Pax's Alternate History Snippet repository.

[Imperator Pax]

Baku - there were many private oil wells there,which was more efficient then what soviet did next.Some polish inventor even planned to made undersea well.
Only reasonable theory - kill Russia with communism before it could replace USA as 1th economy.

Click to shrink...

I don't think it goes that far, I suspect that, and that is what it is my speculation, that people on wallstreet were playing both sides of the coin socialism/marxim/pacifism were all popular with the eastern elite as being in vogue (Henry Ford comes to mind trying to broker peace, he got utopian in his old age trying to play peacemaker and was willing to extend a lot of leeway to the communists,) Ideology and sympathies goes a lot further to me than speculation that it was the plan of action to undermine a nebulous broad threat of competition. [and trotsky comments on that its American capitalist philosophy to brazenly use the revolutionaries against the old empires in Europe, which either he knew something or he was reading the opposite angle of 'oh they're helping us because we'll undermine France and England and Germany']

Similarly, a specific threat, i.e. Standard Oil undermining the Tsars government because they went with Franco-Belgian consortiums or with British oil magnates, I can absolutely see that, but as a nebulous, they might exceed us? I don't see it, not given the broad gulf of US automotive, and US steel manufacturing versus everyone else. Banking similar story your only realistic competition with New York is London, and by 1917 thats a pretty distant second compared to how things were just a few years earlier, Oil, though oil yes, I can see the big oil companies not being happy dealing with Russian competition from before the war, even if it was unrealistic, even if it was pure petty malice I can see them making that decision.

With the 'Other' major industries? Farmers want to keep prices high state side (you see this in the early twenties, farmers want the government to keep prices of wheat where they were, so you get horse trading there, you have deals that are designed and brokered to keep international wheat prices in the early twenties elevated versus supply). There are a lot of people especially immediately post war that have an interest in, 'prices are high, we want them to stay high, and if people are worried about the soviets, if the soviets aren't exporting grain (see the farmer example, and also that the French concessions in Tsarist russia would have been in the Ukraine would have been the breadbasket areas) prices will stay high. If the Russian oil isn't on market, oil prices will remain high. Russia steel production doens't become meaningfully competitive with US steel until much later, because Philadelphia makes a lot of steel by itself, never mind all the other mills.

So rather than a single motive for action, I suspect that you had individual factional markets doing stupid short sighted shit. Like ford is pretty up front he did it for ideological reasons (now absolutely he got paid for it) but he was getting eccentric before ww1 even started, so his whole peace and the industrial world motive I can kind of believe. Morgan Junior I'm less sure about.

And, part of the reason I take this position is that historically in the interwar period, in the pre war period institutionally US industry/wallstreet/millionaire row/etc was a significantly more conciliatory than they were later on in relation to the interaction with other industrial powers (and this is to an extent, pro business interests' default solution was to lobby for tariffs on european goods, but its later that this starts to be expanded post war.)

Vickers arleady made 40mm automatic gun/fot tdestroing torpedo boats/ which could be turned into AA.

Manchuria - they have oil there,which commies found after WW2.Your China could found it now.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, I had conversations on both of these last year, and yeah 40 AAA / SPAAG will show up during the interwar years, it'll be a while before airburst becomes a thing because yes, Vickers was doing it the Germans had a similar program (which evolves into various interwar designs including the smaller 2cm), Bofors was playing with the idea, the US had the 1 inch gun like the idea was there and part of the problem was metal construction (sea water hates you, thats why there was so much brass in the early gun designs like the 1 Inch QF Pom Pom) rusting, but like if it it'll mess up a light boat it'll mess up a plane especially with HE.

As for Manchuria, yeah Geographic conditions for oil fields is a known thing, people were guessing where there could be oil fields in the caucus and in Siberia, and Manchuria in the early 1900s its just a matter of actually staking a well into the oil, confirming and thats why here is a matter of finding the fields in western china including in places like the Tarim basin deposits early

 

[ATP]

I don't think it goes that far, I suspect that, and that is what it is my speculation, that people on wallstreet were playing both sides of the coin socialism/marxim/pacifism were all popular with the eastern elite as being in vogue (Henry Ford comes to mind trying to broker peace, he got utopian in his old age trying to play peacemaker and was willing to extend a lot of leeway to the communists,) Ideology and sympathies goes a lot further to me than speculation that it was the plan of action to undermine a nebulous broad threat of competition. [and trotsky comments on that its American capitalist philosophy to brazenly use the revolutionaries against the old empires in Europe, which either he knew something or he was reading the opposite angle of 'oh they're helping us because we'll undermine France and England and Germany']

Similarly, a specific threat, i.e. Standard Oil undermining the Tsars government because they went with Franco-Belgian consortiums or with British oil magnates, I can absolutely see that, but as a nebulous, they might exceed us? I don't see it, not given the broad gulf of US automotive, and US steel manufacturing versus everyone else. Banking similar story your only realistic competition with New York is London, and by 1917 thats a pretty distant second compared to how things were just a few years earlier, Oil, though oil yes, I can see the big oil companies not being happy dealing with Russian competition from before the war, even if it was unrealistic, even if it was pure petty malice I can see them making that decision.

With the 'Other' major industries? Farmers want to keep prices high state side (you see this in the early twenties, farmers want the government to keep prices of wheat where they were, so you get horse trading there, you have deals that are designed and brokered to keep international wheat prices in the early twenties elevated versus supply). There are a lot of people especially immediately post war that have an interest in, 'prices are high, we want them to stay high, and if people are worried about the soviets, if the soviets aren't exporting grain (see the farmer example, and also that the French concessions in Tsarist russia would have been in the Ukraine would have been the breadbasket areas) prices will stay high. If the Russian oil isn't on market, oil prices will remain high. Russia steel production doens't become meaningfully competitive with US steel until much later, because Philadelphia makes a lot of steel by itself, never mind all the other mills.

So rather than a single motive for action, I suspect that you had individual factional markets doing stupid short sighted shit. Like ford is pretty up front he did it for ideological reasons (now absolutely he got paid for it) but he was getting eccentric before ww1 even started, so his whole peace and the industrial world motive I can kind of believe. Morgan Junior I'm less sure about.

And, part of the reason I take this position is that historically in the interwar period, in the pre war period institutionally US industry/wallstreet/millionaire row/etc was a significantly more conciliatory than they were later on in relation to the interaction with other industrial powers (and this is to an extent, pro business interests' default solution was to lobby for tariffs on european goods, but its later that this starts to be expanded post war.)



Yeah, I had conversations on both of these last year, and yeah 40 AAA / SPAAG will show up during the interwar years, it'll be a while before airburst becomes a thing because yes, Vickers was doing it the Germans had a similar program (which evolves into various interwar designs including the smaller 2cm), Bofors was playing with the idea, the US had the 1 inch gun like the idea was there and part of the problem was metal construction (sea water hates you, thats why there was so much brass in the early gun designs like the 1 Inch QF Pom Pom) rusting, but like if it it'll mess up a light boat it'll mess up a plane especially with HE.

As for Manchuria, yeah Geographic conditions for oil fields is a known thing, people were guessing where there could be oil fields in the caucus and in Siberia, and Manchuria in the early 1900s its just a matter of actually staking a well into the oil, confirming and thats why here is a matter of finding the fields in western china including in places like the Tarim basin deposits early

Click to shrink...

1.Mendeleyew in /or after/ 1906 made forecast about Russian economy future - it supposed to be 1th world economy with 600M people in 2000.He was too optymistic,i think - but Wall Street could take seriously and send Trocky.
Certainly not becouse they liked jews - they do not help them when germans started exiled them before WW2,and do not cared when germans genocided them,too/polish envoy Karski speak both to FDR and them - nobody cared/

2.Yes,airburst was hard to made.I think that swedes with their 40mm first do that properly,pom-poms was inferior.
American 28mm and japaneese/french to be honest/ 25 mm was failure,too
Manchuria - i read,that japaneese seek it,but missed every time.

If i were better writer,i would write TL when they found it,asn as result do not attack USA after their embargo.

 

[Faralis]

1.Mendeleyew in /or after/ 1906 made forecast about Russian economy future - it supposed to be 1th world economy with 600M people in 2000.He was too optymistic,i think - but Wall Street could take seriously and send Trocky.

Click to shrink...

TBH without the 2 WW Russia would be probably very near that population at the change of century...

 

[ATP]

TBH without the 2 WW Russia would be probably very near that population at the change of century...

Click to shrink...

More important - without soviet genocide.They killed more russians then germans.Just like Mao killed more chineese then Japan in OTL.
By the way,what would happen with little fucker in this TL ?

 

[Imperator Pax]

More important - without soviet genocide.They killed more russians then germans.Just like Mao killed more chineese then Japan in OTL.
By the way,what would happen with little fucker in this TL ?

Click to shrink...

Most likely Mao goes back to the family farm in 1920 before getting a job teaching. Historically unlike most of his fellow communist leadership Mao was very adverse to leaving the country as a young man, he didn't go to france, or Germany, he didn't go to the states he read a lot of foreign literature. Mao in this timeline probably ends up expelled from the mainline communist party (again, in orthodox marxism, and reinforced by events in Russia by the young cadres, peasants are socially backwards and the idea of mobilizing them into class conciousness is antithetical to 19th century marxist dogma) but with a strong centralized western china, especially a violently anti-communist one, there won't be a long march heading anywhere north of the Yangtze in this timeline

It would be a case of 'Run away from the rabid dog by running towards the tiger.'

If Mao were willing to leave the country he could go to France, he probably wouldn't go to Russia, at least not immediately (especially not in a timeline where there is still existing territorial conflicts in the Russian civil war until '28 or 29).. Mao could honestly end up in academia as just some minor academic for the rest of his life in this timeline, just disappear into the books, or he could get killed by communist infighting, purged by the KMT and thats all between the period of the twenties and thirties not even focusing on what happens when the second sino-japanese war starts and that gets further and further fuzzy the farther into a divergent china.

 

[ATP]

Most likely Mao goes back to the family farm in 1920 before getting a job teaching. Historically unlike most of his fellow communist leadership Mao was very adverse to leaving the country as a young man, he didn't go to france, or Germany, he didn't go to the states he read a lot of foreign literature. Mao in this timeline probably ends up expelled from the mainline communist party (again, in orthodox marxism, and reinforced by events in Russia by the young cadres, peasants are socially backwards and the idea of mobilizing them into class conciousness is antithetical to 19th century marxist dogma) but with a strong centralized western china, especially a violently anti-communist one, there won't be a long march heading anywhere north of the Yangtze in this timeline

It would be a case of 'Run away from the rabid dog by running towards the tiger.'

If Mao were willing to leave the country he could go to France, he probably wouldn't go to Russia, at least not immediately (especially not in a timeline where there is still existing territorial conflicts in the Russian civil war until '28 or 29).. Mao could honestly end up in academia as just some minor academic for the rest of his life in this timeline, just disappear into the books, or he could get killed by communist infighting, purged by the KMT and thats all between the period of the twenties and thirties not even focusing on what happens when the second sino-japanese war starts and that gets further and further fuzzy the farther into a divergent china.

Click to shrink...

Thanks.So,he become what he should always be - nobody.

 

[Imperator Pax]

September 1917
Though it wouldn't go into effect until next year 3rd​ Division was to be constituted as a second Rifle division. The more ... potentially argumentative point was its Mountain division designation, which was of course more of a matter of fielding them with principally light field guns and 3inch howitzers. The idea of course was mobility and ease of supplying the unit with ammunition, because very likely its posting would be in the Bashan mountain range straddling the border with Szechwan.

That part wasn't in debate. It was simply an indisputable fact.

Fu, Duan's choice as Dujun, was from Hunan province. The fighting had been going on for two weeks now, since the 16th​ when two provincial military officers had declared their independence. Splitting off a couple of counties should have been an easy fix, or would have been if Yuan Shikai had been around, because he could have rallied the beiyang clique as a whole.

Feng had wanted no part of this from the start, but at the same time he hadn't done enough to buck the trend. Feng should have been a little more vocal about it... but there were reasons why he hadn't. Still as president it was of course his job to issue the proclamation of a punitive expedition... which had lead to confusion causing the 8th​ and 30th​ division commanders to wonder what was going on... and thus they started dragging their feet.

... and of course that was only part of it... but that Feng's successor in Kiangsi and two other Dujun had released circular telegrams admonition this whole mess as a bad idea was not a good sign.... and all of those ... those were all northern officers within the Beiyang... it didn't even touch on the mess in Hunan or Szechwan as a result of the eruption of hostilities. .. which involved no less than six provincial governors having their troops shooting, and a litany of minor military commanders proclaiming they ruled their own small fiefs, and were invading their neighbors.

Cao Kun didn't like this mess either... and when they would look back this was probably the ultimate indicator of what would follow after the European War. It set the stage for everything else after, because Zhang Xun had chosen to retire from political affairs, ceding all remaining political power in the north east, manchurian region, to Zhang Tso Lin... but that wasn't so evident in September of 1917.

They themselves had other things to do. The cadre had steering committees and they now had two major trunk routes in the west. The north reached Urumqi already but the southern line hadn't yet reached Lhasa but it was on the paper work. That had been authorized by Yuan Shikai when he'd still been waiting to be coroneted emperor, but the work from Xining, or Lake Qinghai, was still in progress. The delay was one they had warned him about at the time... not that in 1916 Yuan had wanted to listen... but they were having to bypass Szechwan province entirely, which was doable of course but it was also a lot of dynamite.... and the truth was the southern route was a secondary venture ... with the British paying for the route to the Russian border.

He expected that the eight hundred mile southern, or south western, trunk would finish in the spring of next year. Duan didn't care. As long as the western provinces didn't care, and as long as the fixed payment to cover the salt gable came in the prime minister didn't care. The western provinces not causing trouble meant that he largely ignored them. It was not the same as Yuan Shikai had been in Peking, Yuan had trusted the Ma had lived with them, and they were old men together.

Chen Shufan had his cabinet position and all the more reason to stay Peking. He certainly wasn't going to come back and stir the pot, no really that only left Hu in the south... and Hu was too busy watching the same direction they were... wondering what the Szechwanese or the troops from Yuunan were going to do.

"It is a temporary alliance, one of convenience."

Allen nodded looking at the map. "Not the first person to tell me." Hu though didn't want his home town burned to hte ground and risking a famine if one or more Jia slipped over the border to engage in some bushwhacking. "I'm fully aware we're going to need to watch him."

They already had had a contingency for that. Access to Xian from the south took a well known route whether they were talking about from within the province or from the outside. The 'southern gateway' to access the ancient capital and it was ideal a position to post troops to watch the border with Szechwan, and with telephone, and telegraph and radio broadcast and railroad it was choice ground to occupy. As ridiculous as it seemed this was precisely the normal time of the year for cross border skirmishing, or fights between counties.. .the time table of fighting in the provinces and between the provinces remained essential feudal in character a by product of the harvest schedule of farmers, and the seasonal weather determining when some people had free time and privation.

It was the agrarian economy, and the distance and lack of centralized force projection. Corn, and sweet potatoes had swelled the population and with three quarters of those hundreds millions involved in agrarian labor the Qing bureaucracy had never been able to expand to keep up. A single magistrate being responsible for a quarter of million people simply could not be a functional system.

That was how it had been when the dynasty had finally given up the ghost. "So what then?"

Killing Famine... "Before the French," and to be honest the British, "buying up all the wheat surplus they could get their hands on, "Our solution was always if there was a risk pad out with Midwest grain." When there was a problem, or shortage to be expected buy cheap from the interactional market ship it via the union pacific and sail from san francisco bay.

That had been the emergency option for shortfalls. There was no speculation going on back home. No grain hoarders. The prices back in the states was being driven up because the entente had the money to paying higher prices. He didn't fault them there, there was nothing to fault.

"Domestic production at scale. Mechanization."

"Eventually yes, tube wells, There are lot of things we can do." Mechanization on industrial farms favored large square plots, favored certain crops over others. It would mean reshuffling the labor pool, people moving into towns and becoming wage laborers rather than tenant farmers.

Sam picked up his coffee. "Yeah." He sipped. "You never cared for farming."

"Nope."

"Just saying." Sam commented. "Alright, look my staff is drafting their materiel now. Zhang thinks, October." He didn't elaborate which Zhang, "Wu think he's jumping the gun, and figured divisional headquarters won't be ready until the new year."

The opposite estimation, the opposite extreme, "That's rather conservative,"

"Yeah, I thought so to. He thinks," Griswold paused and blew on his coffee, before sipping, "that even moving into the existing space, we will need more time. I have Cameron and Bridges over there helping them try and get set up, wiring telephone banks, so forth just to keep their hands busy I'd otherwise be hunting work for them."

"No one is expecting you to have barracks space for the entire division up. Just space for the headquarters to actually work out."

"Yep, I know that." Forts didn't pop up over night, and they were talking about the permanent basis of a reservation. "The boot camp will be busy training. We'll be done with the barracks before we need them."

It would come to it that they needed more than one training pipeline for basic training, but the current system while perhaps longer than it truly needed to be was comprehensive and suited their needs for training. It wasn't like how the English did it with each battalion carefully guarding their unique lessons as sacred traditions... or at least that had been been how the old British army had worked, maybe the war had knocked that foolishness out.

"Alright so second is comfortably settled in I take it?"

Sam shrugged, "We haven't done much over the last few weeks other than move them back and forth from Zhengzhou to tell the truth." The funerals for the handful of men lost in July came to mind... there was still something to be said for having artillery when the enemy didn't, but city fights were nasty affairs all the same. "What are you thinking about for 3rd​, you've had time to think about the idea?"

A 'Rifle Division' was an Infantry Division. An Infantry division though was not always also a rifle division. "Powell has a lot of goddamn nerve." He grunted without any real heat, then snorted shaking his head, "Its an idea. Mortars and infantry guns. They'll lack the punch of 1st​ to be sure, but its an idea and he's right it would make them more mobile and less constrained even if they had break downs with their tractors, or trucks," Whenever they could actually buy or build enough to provide for the planned division. "I'm not going to say I'm entirely thrilled limiting them to three inchers but if they're going to be up in the mountains it is an idea."

"It would simplify logistics, and realistically it would help our own production meet goals sooner... and lets be honest if Szechwan comes over the border they don't have a lot of artillery."

Chunking ... the story from the newspaper came unbidden. "That's not the same thing as none." He rebutted. "But you're right, means and needs... and it'll be next year at least before we get that far." There was a lot that needed to be done. There were sergeants who needed to go courses, there were staff officer courses... there were war games run.
--
Notes: So again here 3rd's Mountain division moniker refers to her planned lighter field guns, rather than being an alpini style rifle division as would have existed pre war in Italy. Again this goes to the service branch importance of the artillery branch.

One other thing to touch on, is the line that this finishes on. About War Games. This is referring to both table top wargaming and also field exercises. By this point Wargaming in a table top sense has already displaced games like Mahjong in mainline social circles in Xian. So I'm going to digress into social topics, and the history. Mahjong is was originally a card game, it made the shift to tiles in the latter half of the 19th​ thats when the oldest tile sets a material culture item date.

Mahjong is fundamentally though a gambling game, and as will probably make some comment on in the 20s is fundamentally a southern chinese game. This goes to the distinctions, and the cultural distinctions emerging in China during this period in this timeline, effectively it is type cast as Shanghai's game as a gangsters game as a wannabe gangsters game.

That isn't to say that people don't gamble, but gambling still takes the place of, or resumes moving back to using card games, rather than tiles. Again, though Confucian morales, particularly neo confucian ideas in the song and tang dynasty don't approve of gambling (people still do it), but competitive social gaming begins to be subsumed by things like table top wargaming. Particularly modeling land based armies (Xian is a territorial, army centric military structure with an emphasis on its artillery and infantry, there are technically cavalry rules, but thats a legacy).

This goes to the fact that war gaming emerges from Prussia and is very popular world wide, including into the anglosphere across most age groups, and social classes and genders as well. This is lightly touched on in White Wolf, where its exported out, and remains popular up until really ww2 and then somewhat declines, and wargaming in the US is what ultimately leads to Dungeons and Dragons (the rule set for early DND traces back to Napoleonic war gaming rules, thats why its very simulationist on some stuff.) I digress. It forms a key part of staff education in military colleges and also again its something that children of both genders in the US, in England played prior to WW1.

Its effectively perceived as a tool of instruction, its a 'Educational game' as opposed to gambling, in addition to any perceived status factor for being good at something martial related even if you're not in the army, because in theory in 19th​ century 20th​ century literature, being good at war gaming supposedly translated to being good at business (chess also has this stereotype).

 

[ATP]

September 1917
Though it wouldn't go into effect until next year 3rd​ Division was to be constituted as a second Rifle division. The more ... potentially argumentative point was its Mountain division designation, which was of course more of a matter of fielding them with principally light field guns and 3inch howitzers. The idea of course was mobility and ease of supplying the unit with ammunition, because very likely its posting would be in the Bashan mountain range straddling the border with Szechwan.

That part wasn't in debate. It was simply an indisputable fact.

Fu, Duan's choice as Dujun, was from Hunan province. The fighting had been going on for two weeks now, since the 16th​ when two provincial military officers had declared their independence. Splitting off a couple of counties should have been an easy fix, or would have been if Yuan Shikai had been around, because he could have rallied the beiyang clique as a whole.

Feng had wanted no part of this from the start, but at the same time he hadn't done enough to buck the trend. Feng should have been a little more vocal about it... but there were reasons why he hadn't. Still as president it was of course his job to issue the proclamation of a punitive expedition... which had lead to confusion causing the 8th​ and 30th​ division commanders to wonder what was going on... and thus they started dragging their feet.

... and of course that was only part of it... but that Feng's successor in Kiangsi and two other Dujun had released circular telegrams admonition this whole mess as a bad idea was not a good sign.... and all of those ... those were all northern officers within the Beiyang... it didn't even touch on the mess in Hunan or Szechwan as a result of the eruption of hostilities. .. which involved no less than six provincial governors having their troops shooting, and a litany of minor military commanders proclaiming they ruled their own small fiefs, and were invading their neighbors.

Cao Kun didn't like this mess either... and when they would look back this was probably the ultimate indicator of what would follow after the European War. It set the stage for everything else after, because Zhang Xun had chosen to retire from political affairs, ceding all remaining political power in the north east, manchurian region, to Zhang Tso Lin... but that wasn't so evident in September of 1917.

They themselves had other things to do. The cadre had steering committees and they now had two major trunk routes in the west. The north reached Urumqi already but the southern line hadn't yet reached Lhasa but it was on the paper work. That had been authorized by Yuan Shikai when he'd still been waiting to be coroneted emperor, but the work from Xining, or Lake Qinghai, was still in progress. The delay was one they had warned him about at the time... not that in 1916 Yuan had wanted to listen... but they were having to bypass Szechwan province entirely, which was doable of course but it was also a lot of dynamite.... and the truth was the southern route was a secondary venture ... with the British paying for the route to the Russian border.

He expected that the eight hundred mile southern, or south western, trunk would finish in the spring of next year. Duan didn't care. As long as the western provinces didn't care, and as long as the fixed payment to cover the salt gable came in the prime minister didn't care. The western provinces not causing trouble meant that he largely ignored them. It was not the same as Yuan Shikai had been in Peking, Yuan had trusted the Ma had lived with them, and they were old men together.

Chen Shufan had his cabinet position and all the more reason to stay Peking. He certainly wasn't going to come back and stir the pot, no really that only left Hu in the south... and Hu was too busy watching the same direction they were... wondering what the Szechwanese or the troops from Yuunan were going to do.

"It is a temporary alliance, one of convenience."

Allen nodded looking at the map. "Not the first person to tell me." Hu though didn't want his home town burned to hte ground and risking a famine if one or more Jia slipped over the border to engage in some bushwhacking. "I'm fully aware we're going to need to watch him."

They already had had a contingency for that. Access to Xian from the south took a well known route whether they were talking about from within the province or from the outside. The 'southern gateway' to access the ancient capital and it was ideal a position to post troops to watch the border with Szechwan, and with telephone, and telegraph and radio broadcast and railroad it was choice ground to occupy. As ridiculous as it seemed this was precisely the normal time of the year for cross border skirmishing, or fights between counties.. .the time table of fighting in the provinces and between the provinces remained essential feudal in character a by product of the harvest schedule of farmers, and the seasonal weather determining when some people had free time and privation.

It was the agrarian economy, and the distance and lack of centralized force projection. Corn, and sweet potatoes had swelled the population and with three quarters of those hundreds millions involved in agrarian labor the Qing bureaucracy had never been able to expand to keep up. A single magistrate being responsible for a quarter of million people simply could not be a functional system.

That was how it had been when the dynasty had finally given up the ghost. "So what then?"

Killing Famine... "Before the French," and to be honest the British, "buying up all the wheat surplus they could get their hands on, "Our solution was always if there was a risk pad out with Midwest grain." When there was a problem, or shortage to be expected buy cheap from the interactional market ship it via the union pacific and sail from san francisco bay.

That had been the emergency option for shortfalls. There was no speculation going on back home. No grain hoarders. The prices back in the states was being driven up because the entente had the money to paying higher prices. He didn't fault them there, there was nothing to fault.

"Domestic production at scale. Mechanization."

"Eventually yes, tube wells, There are lot of things we can do." Mechanization on industrial farms favored large square plots, favored certain crops over others. It would mean reshuffling the labor pool, people moving into towns and becoming wage laborers rather than tenant farmers.

Sam picked up his coffee. "Yeah." He sipped. "You never cared for farming."

"Nope."

"Just saying." Sam commented. "Alright, look my staff is drafting their materiel now. Zhang thinks, October." He didn't elaborate which Zhang, "Wu think he's jumping the gun, and figured divisional headquarters won't be ready until the new year."

The opposite estimation, the opposite extreme, "That's rather conservative,"

"Yeah, I thought so to. He thinks," Griswold paused and blew on his coffee, before sipping, "that even moving into the existing space, we will need more time. I have Cameron and Bridges over there helping them try and get set up, wiring telephone banks, so forth just to keep their hands busy I'd otherwise be hunting work for them."

"No one is expecting you to have barracks space for the entire division up. Just space for the headquarters to actually work out."

"Yep, I know that." Forts didn't pop up over night, and they were talking about the permanent basis of a reservation. "The boot camp will be busy training. We'll be done with the barracks before we need them."

It would come to it that they needed more than one training pipeline for basic training, but the current system while perhaps longer than it truly needed to be was comprehensive and suited their needs for training. It wasn't like how the English did it with each battalion carefully guarding their unique lessons as sacred traditions... or at least that had been been how the old British army had worked, maybe the war had knocked that foolishness out.

"Alright so second is comfortably settled in I take it?"

Sam shrugged, "We haven't done much over the last few weeks other than move them back and forth from Zhengzhou to tell the truth." The funerals for the handful of men lost in July came to mind... there was still something to be said for having artillery when the enemy didn't, but city fights were nasty affairs all the same. "What are you thinking about for 3rd​, you've had time to think about the idea?"

A 'Rifle Division' was an Infantry Division. An Infantry division though was not always also a rifle division. "Powell has a lot of goddamn nerve." He grunted without any real heat, then snorted shaking his head, "Its an idea. Mortars and infantry guns. They'll lack the punch of 1st​ to be sure, but its an idea and he's right it would make them more mobile and less constrained even if they had break downs with their tractors, or trucks," Whenever they could actually buy or build enough to provide for the planned division. "I'm not going to say I'm entirely thrilled limiting them to three inchers but if they're going to be up in the mountains it is an idea."

"It would simplify logistics, and realistically it would help our own production meet goals sooner... and lets be honest if Szechwan comes over the border they don't have a lot of artillery."

Chunking ... the story from the newspaper came unbidden. "That's not the same thing as none." He rebutted. "But you're right, means and needs... and it'll be next year at least before we get that far." There was a lot that needed to be done. There were sergeants who needed to go courses, there were staff officer courses... there were war games run.
--
Notes: So again here 3rd's Mountain division moniker refers to her planned lighter field guns, rather than being an alpini style rifle division as would have existed pre war in Italy. Again this goes to the service branch importance of the artillery branch.

One other thing to touch on, is the line that this finishes on. About War Games. This is referring to both table top wargaming and also field exercises. By this point Wargaming in a table top sense has already displaced games like Mahjong in mainline social circles in Xian. So I'm going to digress into social topics, and the history. Mahjong is was originally a card game, it made the shift to tiles in the latter half of the 19th​ thats when the oldest tile sets a material culture item date.

Mahjong is fundamentally though a gambling game, and as will probably make some comment on in the 20s is fundamentally a southern chinese game. This goes to the distinctions, and the cultural distinctions emerging in China during this period in this timeline, effectively it is type cast as Shanghai's game as a gangsters game as a wannabe gangsters game.

That isn't to say that people don't gamble, but gambling still takes the place of, or resumes moving back to using card games, rather than tiles. Again, though Confucian morales, particularly neo confucian ideas in the song and tang dynasty don't approve of gambling (people still do it), but competitive social gaming begins to be subsumed by things like table top wargaming. Particularly modeling land based armies (Xian is a territorial, army centric military structure with an emphasis on its artillery and infantry, there are technically cavalry rules, but thats a legacy).

This goes to the fact that war gaming emerges from Prussia and is very popular world wide, including into the anglosphere across most age groups, and social classes and genders as well. This is lightly touched on in White Wolf, where its exported out, and remains popular up until really ww2 and then somewhat declines, and wargaming in the US is what ultimately leads to Dungeons and Dragons (the rule set for early DND traces back to Napoleonic war gaming rules, thats why its very simulationist on some stuff.) I digress. It forms a key part of staff education in military colleges and also again its something that children of both genders in the US, in England played prior to WW1.

Its effectively perceived as a tool of instruction, its a 'Educational game' as opposed to gambling, in addition to any perceived status factor for being good at something martial related even if you're not in the army, because in theory in 19th​ century 20th​ century literature, being good at war gaming supposedly translated to being good at business (chess also has this stereotype).

Click to shrink...

tabletop games? yesss !!!!
With figurines for rich and paper signs for poor versions.
And,when spain flu come,you arleady have infrastructure to save your part of China.Maybe people in USA too,if you suggest to not use aspirin.
P.S There is Amantadine drug who heal from all RNA viruses,including all kinds of flu,easy to produce - maybe you coud made it on time?
In case you have CV now - it is healing it,too.

 

[Imperator Pax]

September 1917
There were stacks of dark blue books piled on the table up against the side wall, and the boxes they had come in, were sitting by table's legs. The books that would be going out to Rifle School's next class, and the Staff Officers College now that they were printed. Some of the books would also be going to Taiyuan, and to the school out west in Lanzhou.

What had become the basis for the infantry officer's primer was ... had begun life as a chronicle of the lessons learned in the Russo Japanese war of 1905... time in the Philippines had impacted it, but practically speaking at the moment everyone was going to infantry school first before anything else... and thus the lessons were about the last war in Asia.... or at least the last war in Asia between two distinct nations rather than these wars in the pocket.

The issue with the states in the war though. "It was bound to happen." Bill commented a little more gruffly than his usual boisterous nature. The war in the Philippines ... and of course to the imperial pivot to Asia had allowed for promotions in record time... but by the time it had been done... well hot fires consumed more fuel. The Congress after the Russo Japanese war had looked at the expense of the army and been unwilling to spend money for certain things, and there had been a break with old school and new schools of thought and of course it was the war department without a war to fight people had gone to the private sector.

Now there was a war to fight. "Crozier has always complained that the army loses the best minds to private industry." Then just to make the point, "Which is why he's head of Ordinance." Cole snarked. "They may not even post them boys overseas."

There was a pause, his youngest brother was now a major as well, "No Daniel has already been told he's going to France with the AEF. I've heard the same from Black Jack." He replied. "Dawes's oldest boy just made full bird. And the youngest just made captain for one of the new divisions." This preparation craze that had swept in... there were older men who'd been lieutenants for ten years that were finally getting second bars... and it wasn't enough. It should have been obvious it was never going to be enough.

"He's what twenty four." Which in peace time was half of what a Guard Lieutenant averaged.

He'd be twenty five in November. That was the situation. Either the cadre members had siblings, or grown sons being called up or promoted to fill out whole new units. "Where is Dawes he's supposed to be here damn it." Allen grunted wrapping his knuckles.

Cole stood up his cavalry boots clacking over the floor, "I'll get him."

The field artillery man joined them about fifteen minutes after the meeting was originally scheduled to begin. "Was looking through what we had going through Shandong especially after July."

It was on the itinerary. "And? If this-" He started to grab for the pages.

Dawes waved him off, "No, geez, I didn't realize how many melons we grew for export." The whole agricultural sector had been caught up in the war. Sugar beets, melons, cotton. It wasn't just them sugar cane was native to south china and the Japanese in Formosa were making a tidy sum of it over their export of Sugar to the English. "No its cotton. All this talk about the Russian line, that business last year with uprising in Kirghiz." Whose principle cash crop was cotton. A region whose labor had been voraciously devoured by the war effort stripping the fields of not just cotton, but also wheat and elsewhere... and the war effort had also stripped the fields of draft animals. "Productivity is nonexistent. I would estimate that Russian production peaked in 1913 and has been declining ever since, and that's only partially the war. The weather is not helping, but some of it is lack of technical innovation from lack of capital. The farming is, Are the sort of goings on daddy would have considered ass backwards." He stopped and waved his hand, "Sorry I'm getting ahead, the Australians their influenza is bad this year its in the papers. Hell it was elevated last year, but it starts in what we would consider the spring. They're on the bottom side of the world and all... but if the war has done anything it has made international trade it has bound us all together in great markets." Selling to markets back home before the war wouldn't have raised any eyebrows. Japan was right next door as well of course some exports there... but then the war had come and demand for everything had skyrocketed. It was no longer just tobacco or cloth or sugar or some coal. It was a demand for every sort of good imaginable.

Pershing had complaints about the French and their brothels, about the moral sickness, the clap and such all the others... as if the French didn't know to watch for venereal diseases in their whore houses... but disease was a problem. They couldn't possibly have guessed just how much of an understatement that would prove.

Something as simple as the flu. It wouldn't be until later that the Australians who had been invalided out could be back traced... or associated with cases in the British Army in France. All that would be academic. The epidemic would sweep over the world, and of course the states would only start counting the pandemic in the following spring... but it had begun well before, and it would last for after the war.

The papers back east would call it the plague of their time, that it was biblical... which at the time was ironic since of course the plague was still actually a thing on the prairies, and the grassy steppe lands... and of course the reality of the plague being the disease to be mindful of was what impacted their policy of epidemiology.
--
It had been over a month now. Two of hunan's regional commanders had taken their territorial militia and declared themselves independent of both Fu, as well as Tan as Dujun. They were striking out on their own... and there was a good chance that they were just the first two... but that wasn't what was worrying them.

"How many troops are in Hunan?"

"In total? God knows." and it wasn't their real problem. "Its not the real problem."

Allen looked from Carter who had asked the question the first place, and then to Dawes. "You think that number is accurate, Sichuan has another twenty battalions?" even if that was only five hundred men, the ... report put forward by John Jordan's office was alarming.

"That would only been ten thousand men, John." The older man replied, "And we know from the shooting in Chunking that the counties are as much at each other's throats as they feuding with the Yunnanese."

But the question was would that hold. Hunan sat on the rail running south, but Duan had other problems than the question of had he fixed the issues that had plagued Yuan Shikai's expeditions... Kiangsi's government really wasn't happy about all of this. Kiangsi's governor, along with the Dujun of Hupeh, and Kiangsu were now pressuring Cao Kun.

"Yeah what if the Yunnanese and the Kweichow bushwhack them then?" Carter asked leaning forward on table. His southern georgian accent strong as he reached for the whisky, "We supposed to just wait."

"Yeah we're supposed to wait. What do you want me to do, post you to Little Ma?"

"It'd give me something to do. I'd rather you do that then send me to Switzerland."

Allen and Dawes shared a look. Then back to the younger man. They nodded, "Alright," Carter rocked back in the chair and stood gripping his suspenders above his gun belt.

"You mean it?"

Carter had been late coming to the Philippines. His class had graduated on time, and he'd left the service as a first lieutenant rather than dawdle and brindle along in the grade with nothing to do. Rather than going back to Georgia he'd stuck taken a slot that had opened in the Cadre after Bai Lang had caught the bullet in July of 1914.


"Yeah of course he means it." Dawes stood up, and pushed him pack in the chair, "Now sit down before you turn the table wrong side." The artillery man grabbed the bourbon and shook. "Look the brigade is trouncing every which way, and that's fine don't tell Hongkui what to do. They've stuck him on this fool's errand let him do it his way. You've got one job you handle that's keep the artillery intact. Its a supply chain. You make sure that those trains run on time, and those batteries roar when they need to."

Even halfway to sloshed they had the younger man's attention. The idea was pretty simple of course. Ma needed technical services. Artillery. The handful of old Krupp guns were from the Dungan revolts for gods sake, some of the other pieces were even originally Russian.
--
Allen flipped through the postal receipts, and then looked at Percy. "Its disunity John Allen. Disunity. Anarchy even." The Brit grumbled. Then he suddenly shifted and banged his hands on the table in a way he wouldn't have done before the war in Europe, "Goodness gracious John Allen they have counties with their own soldiers like its the damned middle ages!"

"Perce. Take a breath and sit down. " Even as he said it he eased the putnam and weale book Reinsch had sent him out of sight.

He half considered getting up... but after a moment Percy sat and went back to nursing his brandy. "I don't... I don't understand. Hunan is a horrible mess." He repeated that more or less a couple of times. Percy had enough self control most of the time to avoid outbursts like this, but he'd gone to observe the fighting, and then gotten on Peking Hankow line and come straight up north and had torn through two or three bottles the night before.

The Green Standard were... for all intents an army based on the preceding dynasty's model of army organization. That was to say that after the Qing had come to power they had stood up the Green Standard based on how the Ming had done things.

They were the Luying. Tiny regional garrisons meant to keep local conditions peaceable.

Maybe it had made sense back then. The Qing had come to power when the thirteen colonies had still been new. Not that he mentioned that to Percy, instead, "Duan claims he's making progress."

"Oh certainly. Progress, if he wasn't fighting a feudal army. You ever seen men with spears charge machine guns."

"I have actually."

Percy clamped his mouth shut. "Right, not everyone has." he shuddered. "I can't. I don't."

"You've seen men with bayonets its not all the different. Just wagering on luck." he replied.

"Maybe that's it. Then." The englishman coughed slightly. There was a slide from the door and a hawk faced man stuck his head in the room. The oak leaves at the major's throat accentuated his scowl.

"He's fine." Allen waved. He wasn't actually talking to the royal marine but to the hui officer behind him.

"yes sir." The Marine replied almost sounded like his cousin Albert.

The door closed. Percy scowled and straightened. "Goodness he didn't even knock."

"He's a marine they don't knock."

"He's a royal marine."

"He serves on a ship and they drink rum Percy. They don't knock."

"You have marine friends."

"That's how I know." He replied, "Hunan." He reiterated steering.

"Its a mess John Allen. Its a terrible mess." Percy shook his head. "Do you know how we reached the numbers we came to," He was listing to one side, "Well its because we know that the units that are supposed to exist on paper aren't at full strength. You're the odd one." He snorted. "Some of the units are a sixth of the size they're supposed to be in Hunan. You sit across from me and even you don't get it. Is it something in the water? Is it htat fucking bandit you shot. You went out in the woods and killed Bai Lang."

"I didn't personally do it."

"you would have."

"If he'd have sat in my crosshairs." Allen lifted the glass. "The White wolf has been dead three years Percy." Bai Lang was dead, he was no longer the problem. Other bandits had come up, and been put down, and there were different problems now.

"The Qing have have been gone longer, and Zhang Xun still tried to put his bonny prince charles on the throne."

He attempted again to steer the conversation, "Hunan?"

"Its gruesome."

"Gruesome is a nice oxford, sanitized word. Duan says he's making progress, but you and John Jordan are both unhappy, so why is that?"

Percy wasn't having it. He was too messed up.... more than the fortified wine, "Do you remember the new years games, you as Gordon.. the frog's face. It was easier then." Percy cracked a fragile smile. His hand shook holding the brandy, "Its the same as back then... the taiping I mean. The central government's army cannot sustain what they're doing John Allen. The Beiyang is supposed to be modern, but they're understrength like the banners or the green standard. Its only a matter of time before they're fighting not just provincial militias, but outright provincial mercenary units... just hired men."

That wasn't quite accurate to the rebellion. There had been mercenaries on both sides. Both foreigners, and mercenary soldiers recruited from neighboring provinces. They had been the units the Qing had considered to have the most success so those militias had been praised.

The irony of course was in the unit genealogical tradition was the beiyang itself could trace its roots to one such unit. The Huai of Li Hongzhang.

It had been based in Anwei... but there had been others. Including one based in Hunan. One whose ranks had reached a hundred thirty thousand men under the command of Zeng Guofan.

"Is there a man who fill his shoes?"

"Right now? No. No one stands out like that. No one has their own bureaucracy." Not right now anyway... they'd only declared independence last month, but he didn't interrupt. "There is no," He sloppy waved as he searched for the word, "secretariats that have popped onto the scene."

"What do you mean?"

"its just the Yamen." Percy continued waving his hand. "The counties who have declared independence are large I'll grant you but they're not the whole province." He stopped to speculate that Tan might still have some control over his former subordinates, but Percy shook his head, "We thought that too, we hoped even, but that's not it either. Maybe they're working together, but these men have ties to the local finances, we know about the salt gabelle. They've been levying other taxes but thats a double edged sword."
--
Notes: It bears mentioning, especially since ATP has pointed out the Influenza Epidemic, in 1917 at the end of September (so the next update) Eastern Zhili suffered a severe flood that inundated Tietsin. There had been heavy summer rains in northern Shanxi and in southern Mongolia, but the main cause of the flood was that dykes in the canal failed. This wrecked massive numbers of farms in the east because of lack of maintenance and the heavy silting which prevented drainage.

The reason this doesn't get more coverage in the next update is because it effects Tietsin and eastern Zhili almost exclusively, and even if it didn't while it made a big splash in Tietsin at the time, it was quickly forgotten but it was endemic of the problem of lack of maintenance on riverine infrastructure during this period. So its get a very oblique mention among this is in the papers, but it was a once in a generation flood, but it has basically no effect on the interior, most of the damage is concentrated in the south east of the province where silting had been the worst (the northern heights, northern henan and shandong) further inland in Shanxi proper there was no flooding or at least no catastrophic flood the summer rains came in and they went down stream they hit where the silting of the river had been building. The river burst its banks, and continued down stream, but as a flood had no meaningful [direct] impact inland.

I digress, this coming Wednesday I plan to update Dominion on the baltic sea with the next part of spring 1628 and update it the following Wednesday of the month thats what I'm aiming for anyway.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Week 1 (B)
​

The TV showing the county government channel was muted, and it was replay anyway of the morning session of the county assembly... before it had adjourned. The room was a mix of smells. Mostly the mix of gun cleaner and microwaved food.

The city and county governments officially were on the same page about what people should do. People should remain calm, and minimize travel and thus not congest traffic, not use up fuel. Given the facts the roads simply 'ended' at the clear border point, transition between the county line and what was the 17th​ century there weren't that many places to go. The European 17th​ century, or the 17th​ century of Europe... there was already a nasty circular email chain working its way around the faculty of which was a better sociological term across the social science departments.

It was an example though regardless of how severe or out of context a problem was that people were going to quibble, and fight over petty details regardless of social status, or educational attainment factors. People were ultimately people, which was what created the problem of official statements. They had even gone so far as to be the Emergency Management guy, a diminutive little fat man in birth control glasses as his brother had pointed out... and well he had come to the realization that... that the scenario they found themselves in was likely to be made worse by there being active fighting going on.

Hunched over a bowl of potatoes said brother said something that was completely unintelligible, swallowed and let the spoon clink down, "I said," The marine non com, "Oly said that shits already started." There was a pause. "a couple hundred grains of lead hitting cars by the volley."

Maybourne had been right. The semi auto civilian Bushmaster rifles were a tremendous advantage, and that was before factoring in other advantages. It however had forced them to face other problems, again just like Maybourne had talked about.

The city, and the county had immediately started arguing. That wasn't entirely unheard of. The county and the city didn't get along for a large number of reasons... and in truth the resulting mess had really been an argument based off of much earlier grievances. The riots, and the panic had set in by that point in the city. There just weren't enough cops in town to handle, especially not when a bunch of them had been ordered to ad hoc town hall.

Three days without regular power had made that even worse. That wasn't true actually, but for the most part was accurate enough for most people. It was probably for the best that way as well. The places in town that did have power were limited to the various places either on back up power running... and burning precious diesel or other fuel... or those projects running on renewable energy of which there were a handful.

That was the nice thing about the city police having converted all their cruisers over to natural gas several years back at least. That was likely small comfort to most people in town. Those patrol cars weren't much use either, given the situation. There were more mercenaries more soldiers, more fighting to come. The local head of the emergency management agency, for the state that was, not the federal one, had come up with a good idea. Since various food would otherwise spoil without refrigeration, the stuff that they couldn't keep by moving to freezers with power, or whatever would be cooked for the community.

That might have sounded obvious, but it had taken someone actually pointing it out to actually be acted on... and even that had had an argument attached to it. It was that divisiveness which was really the problem with a few thousand people never mind the whole city, the wade swathe of the county who had come along for the ride.

Then of course there was the problem of more panicking people fleeing the city, the down time city, near them threatened by siege... and that had been a riot in its own right. It had been like watching two sets of aliens run head long into each other and then start shrieking and pointing at one another at the surprise of the whole affair... over and over again. Thankfully, or not, most people didn't speak German... not after the ... repressions in the early nineteen hundreds one of the professors had pointed out anyway... and even if they had it wasn't weird seventeenth century German that lacked many of the later introduced technical terms of the language of the later centuries. They'd still been able to get the gist of it... that was how they'd come up with the name Wallenstein... and the name of the nearby town... city whatever... and they'd also been able to get the year.

The meeting of the county farmer's association had ... not been productive. They had ideas sure, but they weren't productive ones. The local medieval combat club had been inundated by people who had confused medieval for Renaissance... but they had also put forward ideas. First no one had had ideas, and then everyone seemed to find ideas, and it became very loud in every gathering.

Tony started to nod reflexively, "Well that's why the psychology department insisted on people going to class, to try and impose structure."

Viktor racked the slide of on the german semi automatic pistol as he finished reassembly, "Impose order you mean?"

"Well the email used the word structure." The tenured professor replied. "But yes,"

"There isn't a point, we'd be better off forcing everyone to attend safety briefs." Tony groaned in exaggerated effect at the statement.

"But the sheriff's department got the guy to talk." They'd actually captured a couple of guys... the bushmasters had been only part of that... and, "And yes Wallenstein is probably going to come on, and that no one is taking the threat of pike and shot seriously." Mikey trailed off, as his brother put the bowl of mashed potatoes down.

Maybourne shrugged, "Way I fucking figure, if you've already got kids jumping off rooftops and soccer moms oding on whatever they're hooked on, its a matter of time before we starting getting rioting. Sooner if the mayor tries to push this nationalization bullshit from the alderman's office." Whether or not that maybe trying to lay hands on gold and concentrating it for the purposes of trade with the down timers was probably one of the few smart things to have been said at that meeting it had been phrased in terms that were never were wise to use in front of Americans.

"Eastern europe already basically feeds western Europe at least for staples. Poland is a major grain exporter as it is, Lithuania made the transition to the three field farm-"

"About seventy years ago, if the book is right." and if it wasn't Viktor didn't really care, "But some time in mid 17th​ century. The hanseatic towns are either in decline or are no longer relevant. The bigger question is how do we transport that grain."

"Aren't we within visual distance of the polish border?" Maybourne questioned.

"Grain is bulky its transport<" how it could be transported, "yeah fine, but we're still talking thousands of tons of grain, which we will then have to turn into bread," Tony replied, "There aren't really roads suited for that volume, well the volume we're going to need. We're going to need friends, and we're going to need friends with lots of horses.'

"Griefswald might be able to serve as a port other than that, Stralsund could but its currently under siege by Wallenstein." And that ultimately would be the factor, because in May of 1628 there was no shortage of war in northern Germany, and with war came disease.
--
Notes: This was not the originally planned update, but I'm going to aim to resume updates on wednesday through the rest of this month and get into and through really the first week after transition into the past, but this is short and an ease into this timeline project. This will not effect the Saturday updates of Autumn of Empire's timeline.


Just to reiterate on dominion of the baltic sea, this is a fairly old project this was originally started as a timeline before covid, before Trump was elected, and as a result some of its material is dated in that respect because the real world made other choices.

Anyway its 1628 Philip Julius of Pomerania has been dead for three years, Pomerania is as mentioned severely in decline due to the decline of the Hanseatic league, Stettin is not actually apart of Sweden yet (thats 1630) but that is in the general area to which we're currently referring. In the future, in the summer months the siege of Stralsund will be lifted but not without consequences. Anyway this is an update of the dominon of the baltic sea project with the intention of getting us on track to eventually have this timeline reach the arrival grantville some time this decade.

That is to be completely serious something I don't want to get bogged down on, where frankly the canon novels of 1632 (besides being quite frankly ridiculous in places) stalled out and that the last chronological book number 34 (novels) is 1637 despite being thirty four novels spanning a publication history of over twenty years. To reiterate that Flint died last year, and the canonical series is expected to conclude once the scripts already submitted are published.

On the subject I take a vastly less optimistic view of history than the idealistic flint, and in particular to borrow the summary from the china venture

"Prevent the destruction of the ming empire by the manchu?"

No. Preventing the Ming Collapse is literally impossible by the 1630s if not the manchu then some other invasion or rebellion would have done it. The Ming had litterally not been able to conduct a national level land / tax reform survey sin ce the middle of the 14th​ century and had already devolved provincial powers (the same kind of devolution that would perennially plague the manchu) by this point they were already in slow motion collapse by this point by 1636 China was already in yet another rebellion and the Manchu were already threatening Korea there is no saving the Ming by that point

 

[ATP]

Week 1 (B)
​

The TV showing the county government channel was muted, and it was replay anyway of the morning session of the county assembly... before it had adjourned. The room was a mix of smells. Mostly the mix of gun cleaner and microwaved food.

The city and county governments officially were on the same page about what people should do. People should remain calm, and minimize travel and thus not congest traffic, not use up fuel. Given the facts the roads simply 'ended' at the clear border point, transition between the county line and what was the 17th​ century there weren't that many places to go. The European 17th​ century, or the 17th​ century of Europe... there was already a nasty circular email chain working its way around the faculty of which was a better sociological term across the social science departments.

It was an example though regardless of how severe or out of context a problem was that people were going to quibble, and fight over petty details regardless of social status, or educational attainment factors. People were ultimately people, which was what created the problem of official statements. They had even gone so far as to be the Emergency Management guy, a diminutive little fat man in birth control glasses as his brother had pointed out... and well he had come to the realization that... that the scenario they found themselves in was likely to be made worse by there being active fighting going on.

Hunched over a bowl of potatoes said brother said something that was completely unintelligible, swallowed and let the spoon clink down, "I said," The marine non com, "Oly said that shits already started." There was a pause. "a couple hundred grains of lead hitting cars by the volley."

Maybourne had been right. The semi auto civilian Bushmaster rifles were a tremendous advantage, and that was before factoring in other advantages. It however had forced them to face other problems, again just like Maybourne had talked about.

The city, and the county had immediately started arguing. That wasn't entirely unheard of. The county and the city didn't get along for a large number of reasons... and in truth the resulting mess had really been an argument based off of much earlier grievances. The riots, and the panic had set in by that point in the city. There just weren't enough cops in town to handle, especially not when a bunch of them had been ordered to ad hoc town hall.

Three days without regular power had made that even worse. That wasn't true actually, but for the most part was accurate enough for most people. It was probably for the best that way as well. The places in town that did have power were limited to the various places either on back up power running... and burning precious diesel or other fuel... or those projects running on renewable energy of which there were a handful.

That was the nice thing about the city police having converted all their cruisers over to natural gas several years back at least. That was likely small comfort to most people in town. Those patrol cars weren't much use either, given the situation. There were more mercenaries more soldiers, more fighting to come. The local head of the emergency management agency, for the state that was, not the federal one, had come up with a good idea. Since various food would otherwise spoil without refrigeration, the stuff that they couldn't keep by moving to freezers with power, or whatever would be cooked for the community.

That might have sounded obvious, but it had taken someone actually pointing it out to actually be acted on... and even that had had an argument attached to it. It was that divisiveness which was really the problem with a few thousand people never mind the whole city, the wade swathe of the county who had come along for the ride.

Then of course there was the problem of more panicking people fleeing the city, the down time city, near them threatened by siege... and that had been a riot in its own right. It had been like watching two sets of aliens run head long into each other and then start shrieking and pointing at one another at the surprise of the whole affair... over and over again. Thankfully, or not, most people didn't speak German... not after the ... repressions in the early nineteen hundreds one of the professors had pointed out anyway... and even if they had it wasn't weird seventeenth century German that lacked many of the later introduced technical terms of the language of the later centuries. They'd still been able to get the gist of it... that was how they'd come up with the name Wallenstein... and the name of the nearby town... city whatever... and they'd also been able to get the year.

The meeting of the county farmer's association had ... not been productive. They had ideas sure, but they weren't productive ones. The local medieval combat club had been inundated by people who had confused medieval for Renaissance... but they had also put forward ideas. First no one had had ideas, and then everyone seemed to find ideas, and it became very loud in every gathering.

Tony started to nod reflexively, "Well that's why the psychology department insisted on people going to class, to try and impose structure."

Viktor racked the slide of on the german semi automatic pistol as he finished reassembly, "Impose order you mean?"

"Well the email used the word structure." The tenured professor replied. "But yes,"

"There isn't a point, we'd be better off forcing everyone to attend safety briefs." Tony groaned in exaggerated effect at the statement.

"But the sheriff's department got the guy to talk." They'd actually captured a couple of guys... the bushmasters had been only part of that... and, "And yes Wallenstein is probably going to come on, and that no one is taking the threat of pike and shot seriously." Mikey trailed off, as his brother put the bowl of mashed potatoes down.

Maybourne shrugged, "Way I fucking figure, if you've already got kids jumping off rooftops and soccer moms oding on whatever they're hooked on, its a matter of time before we starting getting rioting. Sooner if the mayor tries to push this nationalization bullshit from the alderman's office." Whether or not that maybe trying to lay hands on gold and concentrating it for the purposes of trade with the down timers was probably one of the few smart things to have been said at that meeting it had been phrased in terms that were never were wise to use in front of Americans.

"Eastern europe already basically feeds western Europe at least for staples. Poland is a major grain exporter as it is, Lithuania made the transition to the three field farm-"

"About seventy years ago, if the book is right." and if it wasn't Viktor didn't really care, "But some time in mid 17th​ century. The hanseatic towns are either in decline or are no longer relevant. The bigger question is how do we transport that grain."

"Aren't we within visual distance of the polish border?" Maybourne questioned.

"Grain is bulky its transport<" how it could be transported, "yeah fine, but we're still talking thousands of tons of grain, which we will then have to turn into bread," Tony replied, "There aren't really roads suited for that volume, well the volume we're going to need. We're going to need friends, and we're going to need friends with lots of horses.'

"Griefswald might be able to serve as a port other than that, Stralsund could but its currently under siege by Wallenstein." And that ultimately would be the factor, because in May of 1628 there was no shortage of war in northern Germany, and with war came disease.
--
Notes: This was not the originally planned update, but I'm going to aim to resume updates on wednesday through the rest of this month and get into and through really the first week after transition into the past, but this is short and an ease into this timeline project. This will not effect the Saturday updates of Autumn of Empire's timeline.


Just to reiterate on dominion of the baltic sea, this is a fairly old project this was originally started as a timeline before covid, before Trump was elected, and as a result some of its material is dated in that respect because the real world made other choices.

Anyway its 1628 Philip Julius of Pomerania has been dead for three years, Pomerania is as mentioned severely in decline due to the decline of the Hanseatic league, Stettin is not actually apart of Sweden yet (thats 1630) but that is in the general area to which we're currently referring. In the future, in the summer months the siege of Stralsund will be lifted but not without consequences. Anyway this is an update of the dominon of the baltic sea project with the intention of getting us on track to eventually have this timeline reach the arrival grantville some time this decade.

That is to be completely serious something I don't want to get bogged down on, where frankly the canon novels of 1632 (besides being quite frankly ridiculous in places) stalled out and that the last chronological book number 34 (novels) is 1637 despite being thirty four novels spanning a publication history of over twenty years. To reiterate that Flint died last year, and the canonical series is expected to conclude once the scripts already submitted are published.

On the subject I take a vastly less optimistic view of history than the idealistic flint, and in particular to borrow the summary from the china venture

"Prevent the destruction of the ming empire by the manchu?"

No. Preventing the Ming Collapse is literally impossible by the 1630s if not the manchu then some other invasion or rebellion would have done it. The Ming had litterally not been able to conduct a national level land / tax reform survey sin ce the middle of the 14th​ century and had already devolved provincial powers (the same kind of devolution that would perennially plague the manchu) by this point they were already in slow motion collapse by this point by 1636 China was already in yet another rebellion and the Manchu were already threatening Korea there is no saving the Ming by that point

Click to shrink...

So,what your americans would do? try change Europe,like in Flint books,or save Pomerania and live by themselves?
In that case,they must fight Sweden and support Poland.

Fighting is easy,but saving Poland from ruling class stupidity could be tricky.
Well,King was smart,his son Władysław/next King/ also,but second son Kazimierz was failure.
Maybe made Władysław live longer and made some reforms ?

 

[Imperator Pax]

So,what your americans would do? try change Europe,like in Flint books,or save Pomerania and live by themselves?
In that case,they must fight Sweden and support Poland.

Fighting is easy,but saving Poland from ruling class stupidity could be tricky.
Well,King was smart,his son Władysław/next King/ also,but second son Kazimierz was failure.
Maybe made Władysław live longer and made some reforms ?

Click to shrink...

My opinion, not just related to short term needs, but also longer term is ironically not on paper that disimilar to Flint. I think the best solution is ome kind of proto European economic comunity based in the baltics running a common currency works best to balance Richeliu's alliance of Ostend and this goes to material requirements for any kind of long term sustainment

Up timers need food, there is the security threat from the thirty years war, there is threat to the south east from turks, there is a nominal russian threat. canonically in 1632 Gustavus Adolphus is a pretty reasonable (probably a little more in that novel than he was history, but it was meant as a stand alone book) guy. I think changing Europe needs to be done, but that the economic institutions to do, and the transparency of good governance should take precedent, and that limits the scale.

This goes to hierarchy of needs, security and food need to be secured pretty much before anything else. Given geographical proximity isolationism isn't a practical option, Poland and Sweden represent for different reasons the best up time trading partners in different commodities. In the long terms those governments need to be stable, that means reciprocal long term economics. People in general, but leadership needs to recognize that there is a reciprocal military and economic return from participating in the system.

The English's largest institutional benefit in terms of the industrial age was its ability to leverage capital through the Bank of England, having a central bank with a coherent policy and understood operating rules

 

[ATP]

My opinion, not just related to short term needs, but also longer term is ironically not on paper that disimilar to Flint. I think the best solution is ome kind of proto European economic comunity based in the baltics running a common currency works best to balance Richeliu's alliance of Ostend and this goes to material requirements for any kind of long term sustainment

Up timers need food, there is the security threat from the thirty years war, there is threat to the south east from turks, there is a nominal russian threat. canonically in 1632 Gustavus Adolphus is a pretty reasonable (probably a little more in that novel than he was history, but it was meant as a stand alone book) guy. I think changing Europe needs to be done, but that the economic institutions to do, and the transparency of good governance should take precedent, and that limits the scale.

This goes to hierarchy of needs, security and food need to be secured pretty much before anything else. Given geographical proximity isolationism isn't a practical option, Poland and Sweden represent for different reasons the best up time trading partners in different commodities. In the long terms those governments need to be stable, that means reciprocal long term economics. People in general, but leadership needs to recognize that there is a reciprocal military and economic return from participating in the system.

The English's largest institutional benefit in terms of the industrial age was its ability to leverage capital through the Bank of England, having a central bank with a coherent policy and understood operating rules

Click to shrink...

True enough.
Poland problem - we arleady created gentry Rebublic cosplaing as Kingdom which turned free farmers into serfs,and made cities irrelevant.With jews as second ruling caste taking care of economic - and actually fucking it.
As a result,we have money for 30.000 good soldiers in 1630,but that was that.We could not made more.
Not with serfs instead of free farmers and jews fucking cities economy.

But,those gentry was not fools.If they saw future to which their system lead,they could made changes,just like later in 1792 Constitution in OTL.

 

[Imperator Pax]

True enough.
Poland problem - we arleady created gentry Rebublic cosplaing as Kingdom which turned free farmers into serfs,and made cities irrelevant.With jews as second ruling caste taking care of economic - and actually fucking it.
As a result,we have money for 30.000 good soldiers in 1630,but that was that.We could not made more.
Not with serfs instead of free farmers and jews fucking cities economy.

But,those gentry was not fools.If they saw future to which their system lead,they could made changes,just like later in 1792 Constitution in OTL.

Click to shrink...

Pretty much point a militaristic aristorcracy and go 'hey do you want to get eaten by the Russians and the holy roman empire, no? financial reforms, you need something other than just farming."

as an example in England fuedal landlords / the aristocracy as a factor of GDP (national income) actually increases after the establishment of the bank of england, and continues to increase in both percentage and overall value until basically the expenses of the late 18th century (their revenues decline in the 19th century with reforms to pay for those , and the now in place Napoleonic wars but we're still talking fifteen percent of the economic fact of (now we're talking about Great Britain) from just the landholding elite). To me at least that sounds like something that would be appeal to an existing aristocratic body that already has political representation in the polish parliament.

This goes back to the Lithuanian comment, the royals adopted the three field system by royal 1557, which saw the ecclesiastical and aristocratic estates follow suit, this was part and parcel of a series of reforms characterized by a perennial hard currency shortage that would effect Poland as well despite significant agricultural exports following the adoption of agricultural reforms (basically the period to 1620 after adoption is something on the order 5.5 million tons of grain travelling through the baltic to places like like the netherlands) which poland had adopted the 3 field system sporadically from the 13th century on, it probably completed transition sometime in the 15th century, though I'm not entirely sure how long it took polish estates to transition from oxen draft animals fully to padded horse collars and horses, and the moldboard plow or heavy steel plows are still a ways in the future OTL largely as a result of iron and steel production being limitted in Polish agriculture prior to this period prior to that adoption is wood plow boards and that's less efficient

That is a loose over view of changes that can be implemented , demonstrated that can be made to convince existing economic productivity both from the martial threat (if not Russian, than certainly the turks), while also demonstrating that landholding farming estates can be made more productive.

Also introducing an internal union's paper currency (while probably not likely to be immediately popular) would be hard to counterfeit down time and could support more broadly economic reforms to support a larger army .

Sweden is not in the same ecnomic fields as Poland, different strengths their not competive with one another. Swedish iron and timber (baltic iron and timber) are what fuels the construction of the british maritime industry during this period (and thats something that is extant for both civilian merchantmen as well as the Royal navy's warships). Swedish exports are in completely different fields than polands.

 

[Imperator Pax]

September 1917​

The thing about modern war was that observers, newsmen, while annoying had gotten very could at tallying all the industrial hardware that moved. Trains carrying shells... it was part of the reason that the British had tied bells around their journalists necks, and also threatened them with espionage is they printed things without clearing censors. How well that would work for the states... well only time would tell. British journalists could move pretty much wherever they liked and like unlike Chinese journalists weren't at risk of getting shanghaied into the army or made to carry baggage for your local bandits. In fact local bandits tended to like getting foreign press attention, and posing for pictures, it helped their reputations.

Duan's advantage was fundamentally grounded in his military background. He was a red leg, and his initial successes hinged on concentrating the Beiyang artillery where it mattered... but artillery couldn't hold territory by itself and while his artillery could make life very uncomfortable for enemy infantry he still needed the troops of other Beiyang commanders to contribute to holding territory, especially with as narrow of a rail corridor as there was.

Percy hadn't actually seen the arrival of troops from Szechwan, or Yunnan, or Kweichow, but he didn't need to. Word had begun to get around that other military commanders were coming from the south and west. Not a trickle either.

This wasn't the systematic maneuver of Tsai's troops two years earlier up from Yuunan. This was an unruly mob, mobs really, individual commanders taking their troops and crossing over the border with not little but no coordination that immediately started fights with not just the rebelling provincial battalions but also Fu's new governance and the nominal civilian provincial authorities. Some of the southern troops crossing from Yuunan were reported to still be carrying the banners of Tsai's campaign against Yuan Shikai, probably for luck Duan wasn't attempting to declare himself emperor after all.... and he hoped that Duan didn't plan to try.

That didn't stop the newspapers from eating it up though. There was no Tsai this go around. That much was clear, because as soon as it had looked like some of the little warlords in Szechwan were even thinking of getting involved the fighting had started up in spurts. "Its just a damned excuse."

Which was true, Allen wasn't going to pretend that the allegations that the new fighting wasn't anything more than one county or even one town's militia jumping the next guy over for some much older grievance using things a hundred miles away as an excuse. "That's not the point Sam. We've been watching mountain range down south for years now. There have been bandits in those mountains for centuries its a perennial problem." Old gangs dissolved as leaders passed away, new ones formed, and they needed to distinguish themselves as a result, "Cole?"

Cullen stopped playing with his hat, and smirked. "I'll take a battalion down there and start enforcing law and order." A battalion though was really all that they could spare at the moment, but it was still a demonstration of how things had changed.

The Qing had never expected them to actually have courts. Maybe to deal with their own internal problems, but the ancient regime had expected them to ask a magistrate to at least nominally arbitrate disputes ... or really go ask Yuan who had been governor of Zhili at the time. When Yuan had become president well there had been a succession of various governors to Zhili province... and other problems.

Court proceedings had never been a thing to worry about. The way you dealt with bandits was you shot them. God knew that was a kindness compared to the Qing penalty a magistrate would give them... but even so live bandits were supposed to be handed over the magistrates... and they had done that during Bai Lang's run through the west... but then Yuan Shikai had died... and now well Percy's comparison to the Taiping situation wasn't one for one.

There weren't any, or at least not anywhere near enough, magistrates to administer... and Shansi and Shensi were neither important enough to really warrant Peking to send anyone worth the post. "So what two battalions. Cole, since Shang going back down there, and then Cole's detachment."

"We're thinking of calling it a cordon." Cole and Shang would both be on 'their side' of the border... but Hongkui was going to be going over the fence with young carter in tow. "We have two to three months of potential fighting, and then potentially some space, yeah?"

"I reckon so." Sam agreed.

So they needed to signal that any bandits thinking the province was going to be an easy target should look elsewhere, "The way I figure out numbers is that we can post the Guards," What would be second division as it gradually stood up and filled ranks, "In the spring at the rail head." As the rest of the division filled as the regiments became regiments in being rather than individual battalions they'd have solid border guard.

The problem as of course these things went was that while they had correctly observed the lack of Tsai having left a successor to succeed him... they had failed to contemplate exactly significant the fissures were in the Beiyang. Duan would make successes as he marched south, and while there might be some truth to his protests that Feng would sabotage him in jealously it was not surely not just that. The initial county level rebellions, the signed declarations of independence from the county level in Hunan spread. County level military commanders first in Szechwan... for whatever such telegrams were worth... and then Yunnan, then seemingly Kweichow and Hupeh and others began to circulate as the year would continue to wane.

Part of that problem was the habit of provincial governors had gotten into the habit even going back to before the Boxer rebellion of circulating such telegrams, and now their county level administrators had cottoned on to the fact that they had sufficient local autonomy that they could do the same and that their provincial superiors could do nothing to stop them.

--
They hadn't talked about it, the flooding in Tietsin had hit the papers and had been bad by all accounts, certainly the summer rains had been hard when they had come but they'd rolled on down stream. No, the real problem was the state of the dykes, so in June so what if the rain had been hard, but by September... it was a different story. He put the North China Herald aside. "The Industrial Stage." Percy declared with a flourish watching the mill work. If this turned into the Brit complaining about how easy an eight hour work week again Allen wasn't sure what he was going to do. Instead he looked at the documents, "Well what are those then?"

"Census estimates." He grunted.

"Has this country even had a census? I thought the one in 1910 fell through," Percy trailed off... and made a small noise.

"Well that is the thinking." Allen replied, "Griswold is aiming to take stock of the province in 1920," Not that they didn't use the tabulating machines for other projects. "Szechwan is about the same size Austria Hungary," he tilted his head, blew out a breath looking at the fan rotating, "or the States were in 1890." Thus he wouldn't have been surprised if by 1920 that held and there were seventy million odd szechwanese by then.

Not that they planned to actually try and enumerate Szechwan. There were could be a margin of error of course, but the growth in the provinces they could count along with Rockhill's work and other logisticians should give them an idea. Percy was heedless of this, "and Pensions," Percy mentioned looking at the paper packet.

"1920." Maybe they should have started thinking about it sooner, but things had changed so much in the time since the old buddha had died, "there will be a lot of changes. We're already moving to life time employment," As it was it wasn't as if they weren't turning towards near hereditary employment. He wasn't going to tell Percy that that was aimed at furthering the rapid industirlization. "Have you talked to Soho?"

"Only that I tried to convince him not to go down there." That had been a fool's errand to even contemplate. "I failed to do so of course. To succeed in talking him out of it."

The question was how would the newspapers record events to the Japanese people, how would this be memorialized. The Terauchi government clearly agreed with Duan's interests in trying bring the south back under a centralized organization. Duan probably wouldn't have cared about how civilian policy was pursued if the provinces would just pay the taxes that south had remitted to Peking to Yuan Shikai or the dynasty before him... as it was coffers were alarmingly starting to run dry with the volume of shells Duan's troops were expending.

... and part of that was that Duan's Beiyang troops had more than a dozen calibers of shells in service bought piecemeal and often in small patches so it was difficult to standardize... that was no surprise of course every knew that was a problem but the qing had had financial problems, then Yuan, now the same with Duan.

"Speaking of finances."

He paused, and considered, "Your, have your people in New York have they talked to JP Morgan," The firms, "the French or the Russians?" or the agents trying to negotiate for credit,

"The Russians."

"They're overleveraged. The Federal Reserve said that last year."

Percy grimaced, "To the tune of about ten billion rubbles as it happens."

He had heard it was closer to eleven, but decided at that metric at that volume... it no longer mattered. If you were that overleveraged well that the bank's problem, and that was precisely why the Reserve had been saying stop, "That's just," The "foreign loans." He observed.

"Oh yes. The Russian government is outstanding to some fifty billion in total."

That made sense why the Russian government had been willing to accept significant restructuring of internal markets, and areas. The Russians had always been completely and utterly dependent on French capital ... but the war well French investment had faced other issues as French credit had been tied up elsewhere... Kerensky making those concessions made more sense given the overleveraged state with an actual number put to it.

He thought about the price the Russians had been willing to pay in 1915 for rolling blocks... for any sort of rifle no matter how outdated it had seemed. That the rolling block would take their rimmed modern cartridge was a boon to be sure.

"The bolsheviks have seized power in Tashkent."

The Russian Civil War was underway. Not that it would be called that until later. The irony of ironies was not to be Korlinov's failure, but what the coming year would be, would hold. The British response, and funding as British fears of Russian influence redoubled with the new Bolshevik change... and of course the mergence of distinct White Russian factions with different backers among the great powers.
--
Notes: Ok so technically there a number of start dates to the Russian civil war in just 1917, I'm not definitively saying its September of 1917. You could make the argument the Russian Empire had been in a civil war since 1916 (I know some people who hold that position academically, in addition to some good literature on that topic) or even earlier, and there are plenty of end dates based on how much you count the soviets killing one another never mind the anarchists, or the peasant uprisings, or the whites or the ethnic uprisings.

This however is the big timeline divergence that effects international perceptions and relations, this leads into MacKinder, and on the Russian side Fyodor Keller, Wrangel and among all the other zany cartoon characters like ungern. The reason its the Russian Civil War's consequences is because of Russia's ties culturally, physically, and economically with the powers in Europe. China was a fourth of the planet's population but economically and socially isolated from a europe and as one might expect despite French, and Russian protests and claims throughout the first world war that foreign investment would return it didn't. Belgium investment similarly largely dried up, in part poached by danish firms but also Belgian shareholders sold back to Chinese stockholders this is the case of investments made by the 'Research Clique' who were never militarily powerful but were very economically successful. To the point that a number of them ended up leaving political office went into banking and retired financially stable.

This compounded of course by the events in may of 1919 both with Versailles, and also with John Jordan and the eight power arms control agreement the embargo that would last nominally for really about a decade with most people have broken it fairly soon after, which will be touched on. That kind of agreement only really comes about because of the first world war and changes in international norms Versailles as an international treaty would have been unthinkable before the Russo Japanese war. A good example of this is look at the end of the Napoleonic war and how France as the defeated power was treated versus Versailles. It went well beyond the scope of previous treaties, even though its very much revenge on the French part for the Franco-Prussian defeat.

Economically, and Socially though, British and French exhaustion and Versailles couple to largely remove them from the Chinese sphere of influence. That failure to ratify Versailles had very little tangible effect on european politics, but Versailles itself had serious effects on Chinese consumption of imported goods. (Which surprise surprise, France and Britain then complain about, but politically they do very little about it).

The French reach the conclusion after Versailles (ultimately proven erroneous but they didn't know that) that the anglo sphere was not going to come save france a second time and began looking for a security guarantor in the east. (Poland, the Soviet Union as the natural successor to Russia, they talked to Romania and the newly independent other states). This was the overwhelming french foreign policy concern post war. The British went into a post war depression that lasted basically until the the military build up that would lead into the second world war. [And of course part of the French inability to act besides the demographic crisis is that western european economic interdependence and cooperation before ww1 was at an all time high and that was completely gutted by the first world war and only returned to that level as a result of the Marshal Plan and the creation of the EEC, and the reason it failed to do so sooner was French protectionism post ww1]

So thus in this timeline the first major change and reorienting in politics are the changes in central asia that come out of the alternate Russian civil war that will progress after this point.

This is also in terms of planned updates the first of two, conclusionary segments for 1917, the other will be at the end of October aimed at major reorganization changes that begin to take place. Part of this is due to the fact that in November 1917 due to persistent logistical and financial issues, as well as disagreement with the Beiyang Duan Qirui's advance to Hunan grinds to a halt. His forces there start atritting themselves and additional rebel forces begin to crop up, and this prompts a political schism to emerge from the eastern beiyang provinces. This is the Feng-Duan split of the clique between the President and the prime minister and will set up for the Anhui Zhili war later on between the two men's respective clique but it really has its roots here.

 

[ATP]

Pretty much point a militaristic aristorcracy and go 'hey do you want to get eaten by the Russians and the holy roman empire, no? financial reforms, you need something other than just farming."

as an example in England fuedal landlords / the aristocracy as a factor of GDP (national income) actually increases after the establishment of the bank of england, and continues to increase in both percentage and overall value until basically the expenses of the late 18th century (their revenues decline in the 19th century with reforms to pay for those , and the now in place Napoleonic wars but we're still talking fifteen percent of the economic fact of (now we're talking about Great Britain) from just the landholding elite). To me at least that sounds like something that would be appeal to an existing aristocratic body that already has political representation in the polish parliament.

This goes back to the Lithuanian comment, the royals adopted the three field system by royal 1557, which saw the ecclesiastical and aristocratic estates follow suit, this was part and parcel of a series of reforms characterized by a perennial hard currency shortage that would effect Poland as well despite significant agricultural exports following the adoption of agricultural reforms (basically the period to 1620 after adoption is something on the order 5.5 million tons of grain travelling through the baltic to places like like the netherlands) which poland had adopted the 3 field system sporadically from the 13th century on, it probably completed transition sometime in the 15th century, though I'm not entirely sure how long it took polish estates to transition from oxen draft animals fully to padded horse collars and horses, and the moldboard plow or heavy steel plows are still a ways in the future OTL largely as a result of iron and steel production being limitted in Polish agriculture prior to this period prior to that adoption is wood plow boards and that's less efficient

That is a loose over view of changes that can be implemented , demonstrated that can be made to convince existing economic productivity both from the martial threat (if not Russian, than certainly the turks), while also demonstrating that landholding farming estates can be made more productive.

Also introducing an internal union's paper currency (while probably not likely to be immediately popular) would be hard to counterfeit down time and could support more broadly economic reforms to support a larger army .

Sweden is not in the same ecnomic fields as Poland, different strengths their not competive with one another. Swedish iron and timber (baltic iron and timber) are what fuels the construction of the british maritime industry during this period (and thats something that is extant for both civilian merchantmen as well as the Royal navy's warships). Swedish exports are in completely different fields than polands.

Click to shrink...

All true.And,in 1628 both gentry and Kings was smart enough to made reforms.We failed later,becouse gentry become poor and magnats tool after Deluge,and Jan Kazimierz,king from 1648,was failure who do not cooperated with gentry but wanted absolute power.Which do not worked.

So,at least till 1648 you have window of opportunity for reforms.

P.S our elite winged hussarls,capable of going through everything,was still fully cpable in 1628.They start devolving after 1648,when they trained less.

September 1917​

The thing about modern war was that observers, newsmen, while annoying had gotten very could at tallying all the industrial hardware that moved. Trains carrying shells... it was part of the reason that the British had tied bells around their journalists necks, and also threatened them with espionage is they printed things without clearing censors. How well that would work for the states... well only time would tell. British journalists could move pretty much wherever they liked and like unlike Chinese journalists weren't at risk of getting shanghaied into the army or made to carry baggage for your local bandits. In fact local bandits tended to like getting foreign press attention, and posing for pictures, it helped their reputations.

Duan's advantage was fundamentally grounded in his military background. He was a red leg, and his initial successes hinged on concentrating the Beiyang artillery where it mattered... but artillery couldn't hold territory by itself and while his artillery could make life very uncomfortable for enemy infantry he still needed the troops of other Beiyang commanders to contribute to holding territory, especially with as narrow of a rail corridor as there was.

Percy hadn't actually seen the arrival of troops from Szechwan, or Yunnan, or Kweichow, but he didn't need to. Word had begun to get around that other military commanders were coming from the south and west. Not a trickle either.

This wasn't the systematic maneuver of Tsai's troops two years earlier up from Yuunan. This was an unruly mob, mobs really, individual commanders taking their troops and crossing over the border with not little but no coordination that immediately started fights with not just the rebelling provincial battalions but also Fu's new governance and the nominal civilian provincial authorities. Some of the southern troops crossing from Yuunan were reported to still be carrying the banners of Tsai's campaign against Yuan Shikai, probably for luck Duan wasn't attempting to declare himself emperor after all.... and he hoped that Duan didn't plan to try.

That didn't stop the newspapers from eating it up though. There was no Tsai this go around. That much was clear, because as soon as it had looked like some of the little warlords in Szechwan were even thinking of getting involved the fighting had started up in spurts. "Its just a damned excuse."

Which was true, Allen wasn't going to pretend that the allegations that the new fighting wasn't anything more than one county or even one town's militia jumping the next guy over for some much older grievance using things a hundred miles away as an excuse. "That's not the point Sam. We've been watching mountain range down south for years now. There have been bandits in those mountains for centuries its a perennial problem." Old gangs dissolved as leaders passed away, new ones formed, and they needed to distinguish themselves as a result, "Cole?"

Cullen stopped playing with his hat, and smirked. "I'll take a battalion down there and start enforcing law and order." A battalion though was really all that they could spare at the moment, but it was still a demonstration of how things had changed.

The Qing had never expected them to actually have courts. Maybe to deal with their own internal problems, but the ancient regime had expected them to ask a magistrate to at least nominally arbitrate disputes ... or really go ask Yuan who had been governor of Zhili at the time. When Yuan had become president well there had been a succession of various governors to Zhili province... and other problems.

Court proceedings had never been a thing to worry about. The way you dealt with bandits was you shot them. God knew that was a kindness compared to the Qing penalty a magistrate would give them... but even so live bandits were supposed to be handed over the magistrates... and they had done that during Bai Lang's run through the west... but then Yuan Shikai had died... and now well Percy's comparison to the Taiping situation wasn't one for one.

There weren't any, or at least not anywhere near enough, magistrates to administer... and Shansi and Shensi were neither important enough to really warrant Peking to send anyone worth the post. "So what two battalions. Cole, since Shang going back down there, and then Cole's detachment."

"We're thinking of calling it a cordon." Cole and Shang would both be on 'their side' of the border... but Hongkui was going to be going over the fence with young carter in tow. "We have two to three months of potential fighting, and then potentially some space, yeah?"

"I reckon so." Sam agreed.

So they needed to signal that any bandits thinking the province was going to be an easy target should look elsewhere, "The way I figure out numbers is that we can post the Guards," What would be second division as it gradually stood up and filled ranks, "In the spring at the rail head." As the rest of the division filled as the regiments became regiments in being rather than individual battalions they'd have solid border guard.

The problem as of course these things went was that while they had correctly observed the lack of Tsai having left a successor to succeed him... they had failed to contemplate exactly significant the fissures were in the Beiyang. Duan would make successes as he marched south, and while there might be some truth to his protests that Feng would sabotage him in jealously it was not surely not just that. The initial county level rebellions, the signed declarations of independence from the county level in Hunan spread. County level military commanders first in Szechwan... for whatever such telegrams were worth... and then Yunnan, then seemingly Kweichow and Hupeh and others began to circulate as the year would continue to wane.

Part of that problem was the habit of provincial governors had gotten into the habit even going back to before the Boxer rebellion of circulating such telegrams, and now their county level administrators had cottoned on to the fact that they had sufficient local autonomy that they could do the same and that their provincial superiors could do nothing to stop them.

--
They hadn't talked about it, the flooding in Tietsin had hit the papers and had been bad by all accounts, certainly the summer rains had been hard when they had come but they'd rolled on down stream. No, the real problem was the state of the dykes, so in June so what if the rain had been hard, but by September... it was a different story. He put the North China Herald aside. "The Industrial Stage." Percy declared with a flourish watching the mill work. If this turned into the Brit complaining about how easy an eight hour work week again Allen wasn't sure what he was going to do. Instead he looked at the documents, "Well what are those then?"

"Census estimates." He grunted.

"Has this country even had a census? I thought the one in 1910 fell through," Percy trailed off... and made a small noise.

"Well that is the thinking." Allen replied, "Griswold is aiming to take stock of the province in 1920," Not that they didn't use the tabulating machines for other projects. "Szechwan is about the same size Austria Hungary," he tilted his head, blew out a breath looking at the fan rotating, "or the States were in 1890." Thus he wouldn't have been surprised if by 1920 that held and there were seventy million odd szechwanese by then.

Not that they planned to actually try and enumerate Szechwan. There were could be a margin of error of course, but the growth in the provinces they could count along with Rockhill's work and other logisticians should give them an idea. Percy was heedless of this, "and Pensions," Percy mentioned looking at the paper packet.

"1920." Maybe they should have started thinking about it sooner, but things had changed so much in the time since the old buddha had died, "there will be a lot of changes. We're already moving to life time employment," As it was it wasn't as if they weren't turning towards near hereditary employment. He wasn't going to tell Percy that that was aimed at furthering the rapid industirlization. "Have you talked to Soho?"

"Only that I tried to convince him not to go down there." That had been a fool's errand to even contemplate. "I failed to do so of course. To succeed in talking him out of it."

The question was how would the newspapers record events to the Japanese people, how would this be memorialized. The Terauchi government clearly agreed with Duan's interests in trying bring the south back under a centralized organization. Duan probably wouldn't have cared about how civilian policy was pursued if the provinces would just pay the taxes that south had remitted to Peking to Yuan Shikai or the dynasty before him... as it was coffers were alarmingly starting to run dry with the volume of shells Duan's troops were expending.

... and part of that was that Duan's Beiyang troops had more than a dozen calibers of shells in service bought piecemeal and often in small patches so it was difficult to standardize... that was no surprise of course every knew that was a problem but the qing had had financial problems, then Yuan, now the same with Duan.

"Speaking of finances."

He paused, and considered, "Your, have your people in New York have they talked to JP Morgan," The firms, "the French or the Russians?" or the agents trying to negotiate for credit,

"The Russians."

"They're overleveraged. The Federal Reserve said that last year."

Percy grimaced, "To the tune of about ten billion rubbles as it happens."

He had heard it was closer to eleven, but decided at that metric at that volume... it no longer mattered. If you were that overleveraged well that the bank's problem, and that was precisely why the Reserve had been saying stop, "That's just," The "foreign loans." He observed.

"Oh yes. The Russian government is outstanding to some fifty billion in total."

That made sense why the Russian government had been willing to accept significant restructuring of internal markets, and areas. The Russians had always been completely and utterly dependent on French capital ... but the war well French investment had faced other issues as French credit had been tied up elsewhere... Kerensky making those concessions made more sense given the overleveraged state with an actual number put to it.

He thought about the price the Russians had been willing to pay in 1915 for rolling blocks... for any sort of rifle no matter how outdated it had seemed. That the rolling block would take their rimmed modern cartridge was a boon to be sure.

"The bolsheviks have seized power in Tashkent."

The Russian Civil War was underway. Not that it would be called that until later. The irony of ironies was not to be Korlinov's failure, but what the coming year would be, would hold. The British response, and funding as British fears of Russian influence redoubled with the new Bolshevik change... and of course the mergence of distinct White Russian factions with different backers among the great powers.
--
Notes: Ok so technically there a number of start dates to the Russian civil war in just 1917, I'm not definitively saying its September of 1917. You could make the argument the Russian Empire had been in a civil war since 1916 (I know some people who hold that position academically, in addition to some good literature on that topic) or even earlier, and there are plenty of end dates based on how much you count the soviets killing one another never mind the anarchists, or the peasant uprisings, or the whites or the ethnic uprisings.

This however is the big timeline divergence that effects international perceptions and relations, this leads into MacKinder, and on the Russian side Fyodor Keller, Wrangel and among all the other zany cartoon characters like ungern. The reason its the Russian Civil War's consequences is because of Russia's ties culturally, physically, and economically with the powers in Europe. China was a fourth of the planet's population but economically and socially isolated from a europe and as one might expect despite French, and Russian protests and claims throughout the first world war that foreign investment would return it didn't. Belgium investment similarly largely dried up, in part poached by danish firms but also Belgian shareholders sold back to Chinese stockholders this is the case of investments made by the 'Research Clique' who were never militarily powerful but were very economically successful. To the point that a number of them ended up leaving political office went into banking and retired financially stable.

This compounded of course by the events in may of 1919 both with Versailles, and also with John Jordan and the eight power arms control agreement the embargo that would last nominally for really about a decade with most people have broken it fairly soon after, which will be touched on. That kind of agreement only really comes about because of the first world war and changes in international norms Versailles as an international treaty would have been unthinkable before the Russo Japanese war. A good example of this is look at the end of the Napoleonic war and how France as the defeated power was treated versus Versailles. It went well beyond the scope of previous treaties, even though its very much revenge on the French part for the Franco-Prussian defeat.

Economically, and Socially though, British and French exhaustion and Versailles couple to largely remove them from the Chinese sphere of influence. That failure to ratify Versailles had very little tangible effect on european politics, but Versailles itself had serious effects on Chinese consumption of imported goods. (Which surprise surprise, France and Britain then complain about, but politically they do very little about it).

The French reach the conclusion after Versailles (ultimately proven erroneous but they didn't know that) that the anglo sphere was not going to come save france a second time and began looking for a security guarantor in the east. (Poland, the Soviet Union as the natural successor to Russia, they talked to Romania and the newly independent other states). This was the overwhelming french foreign policy concern post war. The British went into a post war depression that lasted basically until the the military build up that would lead into the second world war. [And of course part of the French inability to act besides the demographic crisis is that western european economic interdependence and cooperation before ww1 was at an all time high and that was completely gutted by the first world war and only returned to that level as a result of the Marshal Plan and the creation of the EEC, and the reason it failed to do so sooner was French protectionism post ww1]

So thus in this timeline the first major change and reorienting in politics are the changes in central asia that come out of the alternate Russian civil war that will progress after this point.

This is also in terms of planned updates the first of two, conclusionary segments for 1917, the other will be at the end of October aimed at major reorganization changes that begin to take place. Part of this is due to the fact that in November 1917 due to persistent logistical and financial issues, as well as disagreement with the Beiyang Duan Qirui's advance to Hunan grinds to a halt. His forces there start atritting themselves and additional rebel forces begin to crop up, and this prompts a political schism to emerge from the eastern beiyang provinces. This is the Feng-Duan split of the clique between the President and the prime minister and will set up for the Anhui Zhili war later on between the two men's respective clique but it really has its roots here.

Click to shrink...

Russia still had gold/1000t,im OTL Lenin take it and gave 100t to germans and 900 t to Wall Street/
And was dependent on french technology - their fieldguns was mostly french,the same goes for planes.

Interesting things - they lost,becouse tsar forbid people from drink vodka during war.
And White lost fighting each other,and openly talking about taking down minorities.

Which is what Lenin did later - but,he never was open about that.

P.S Unger was mad - but one of his commanders,Ferdynand Ossendowski who later run from soviets through Siberia/even saw there entry to Agharta!/ was not.
He later write famous book about that,you could use him for your China/in OTL he come back to Poland/

 

[Imperator Pax]

Week 1 (c)​

Michael idly reflected that it was a good thing Luke didn't have a swear jar. That was probably a good thing ... or it would have been if paper money hadn't rapidly devalued itself to uselessness as a result of the sudden case of time travel to the early modern era. He leaned back and looked up at the high ceiling, a reminder that this house had been built without air conditioning in mind.

"Fuck." Walter muttered as he continued to model, and check math, "fuck..." He scratched down some details on a pad. He looked at the map again, "Fuck... fucking county administration, gah." The deputy threw up his hands, looking disgustedly at the error message on the computer, "Stupid magical ring of fire bullshit... this gives me a headache, hey mikey any idea when they're gonna get back?"

Michael sat up, "Uhm, no I don't , sorry." All he really knew was that Oliver had... gotten called to do something. He didn't really know what. As one of four full time lieutenants in the county sheriff's department who had been in the county at the time. Oliver was fairly high up there in terms of management ordinarily anyway, and he was Walter's immediate superior. If the Sheriff was as tradition dictated equivalent to a colonel, the chief deputy was the little bird... or occasionally a major... and then major subdivisions were filled out by lieutenants and captains... it wasn't quite one to one the army... but there were certain antiquarian ideas that retained from the young republic... and it was going to bit them in their collective...

"Its gonna bite us in our ass. We don't have enough people. Fuck we didn't have enough people before this shit."

"What are you doing?" He decided to ask.

"Luke has a professional GIS suite, I'm attempting," Since he wasn't here, and since apparently Walt wasn't having a lot of luck "To plug in our geography and population details into the parts of north Germany we replaced ... or at least just their geography."

"I didn't know you did that in the corp."

Walter sent him a dirty look. "Yeah, well... I really need a second set of eyes used to this software. I also only normally have to plug in crime data, and draw circles, so..." He trailed off glaring from printed off maps, to screens, to notepads and scratch work.

"We could go to the university even if its some module that Luke is using for his research I'm sure the geography and political science labs would have them." Presumably it was something about the preponderance of states or areas that adopted hydroelectric, relative to accessible coal deposits, or some other facet of 20th​ century electrification waves... but Michael didn't go that far. "What do you have so far?"

"I have our rough geographic dimensions, orientation, the altitude changes, so I know roughly how much land was displaced."

There were rough, very rough, mass calculations pulled up on one of the tabs of another calculating program... never mind how much energy it would take to move that much material physically... it boggled the mind.

Walter got up and sauntered around the map table.

The toilet flushed and Michael's brother Tony walked back into the room air drying his hands. Tony looked at the satellite images of the down, and the various marks that had been drawn on the map with a mix of excitement, recognition, and ... something else that Michael didn't recognize, "I never thought I'd see one of these done like this... outside of the usual training areas." They were height and terrain elevations... it didn't take a genius to figure that Michael would have kicked himself for not realize it sooner... but that made sense.

What was clipped on both man's hips though suddenly stood out. They were radios.... Michael had seen them the other day, but had not at the time made much of them. There were still range limitations, but the cell phone network more or less had stabilized on the basis of what towers were still working.

The mud room door opened and Oliver strutted in wearing shiny new captain's insignia, double bars, which he was exuberantly proud of and announced to them. Walter just complained that was going to make things worse in terms of between the Sheriff's department, and the City Police about who got to deputize who... which was a problem Walter had mentioned before.

"Did you get it working?"

"Do you, do I look like I got it working, bro?" Walter responded to Luke's question, "Can you come the fuck over here, and show me what I'm doing wrong."

While they went and fucked with the computer Michael and his brother turned to Oliver, "So what's popping then?" Tony asked.

"So anyway," Oliver shrugged, "My uncle has county admin calmed down... at least for now. I mean that's gonna go out the window if Wallenstein does something stupid, or people start breaking into liquor stores but for the moment things are okay. As long as the power stays I think they'll manage to not run around like chickens with their heads cut off."

"Isn't your mother-,"

"Yeah, but she believes me when I tell her that our portable radios are magical words of sending," that was a DND joke, "and we will totally know that if Wallenstein tries anything, so we can deal with it." Oliver replied, "I mean like..." He trailed. .. Michael felt the looks as his friends, the marines in the room who hadn't been rear echelon motherfuckers as one time his brother, a little too deep in the Christmas punch has complained, after one argument too many had snapped, "Man I really wish you had bought that tank." He trailed off.

Luke looked at him, and scoffed, "Yeah, I don't think it'd do us a whole lot of good, besides the county MRAPs will get better gas mileage, and that's going to be important. Having a working seventy five millimeter sherman and ammo wouldn't do us all that much good..."

"Tch imagine if Anderson had come along."

"Fuck Anderson, give me Clemson." Oliver snorted, "And no not for the football." The tension evaporated among them... even if it didn't change the fact that their situation was that the Holy Roman Empire could afford to drown them in bodies if that was what Wallenstein chose to do, and they weren't prepared for it.

Tony punched him in the arm, "Hey, I might have given you some shit about joining the army, but like you need to back to the university." The non com glanced, "Luke like I'm sure you're doing stuff, but you too man."
Luke nodded, "There is a lot that needs to be done... I wish we had more specialists in early modern history," Michael could empathize, most of the history department, and political science department were focused on other areas, same with the other social sciences. "Lloyd's right that it would have been better if we had replaced the down time county, not be dropped into the thirty years war, the frontlines of the conflict."
--

The words of a preacher cut down too young echoed in his thoughts; 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.' Politics was inherently dynastic, but especially in old towns. That was true for both parties, and his pulpits, especially the wednesday one, had never been more full than after the Ring of Fire.

People claimed to not want people to starve, but could squeal if things that weren't even theirs to begin with had to be taken for the common good. It could have been worse he had had an uncle who'd told him what it had been like during the DC race riots had been like. There had been nothing like what had happened in April of 68. Not that there needed to be to wreck the inner city economy of a much smaller town.

The Mayor seemed to think she could keep up meeting with the church elders, and that would be enough to help. The whole situation with the food was going to help, but it had already stirred everyone up. The local university administration was bucking the Mayor, that had been apparent when university administration had called an emergency faculty meeting for the following day, and he was pretty sure that had been done to stop any more unilateral decisions until they could figure out what they wanted.

He doubted they would get very far. Not quickly anyway; there were plenty of white liberals on the faculty but then that was why he remembered the quote from King. That they weren't willing to go along with anything unconditional made sense, but at the same time was terrible. Thankfully the church, churches really, were used to food assistance programs... food banks...they'd be able to pick up the slack for the time their own stocks lasted. The problem with that was that the City Council, and their County equivalents had been all too ready to nearly come to blows with one another.

As he thought back of his uncle telling his teenage self the stories of DC during the riots he half way wished that the objections about the militarization of police had started far sooner. Oh the 'Reforms' that old Sheriff, and the current sheriff had worked on hadn't been what white people would have called racist. If anything the 'professional standards' had eliminated most of the old guard in favor of hand picked recruits who had gone off to fight the war on terror after nine eleven. That was what concerned him, what had always concerned him.

The old money in the county still controlled a lot. That network of patronage had once controlled the mills, and the large farms had diversified after the great depression relying on politics to keep them afloat. Their numbers had grown smaller as the years had gone on, but the large farms were still there, and they still controlled who got elected to the County Judge among other things. They were going to be a lot more prickly about property rights than anyone else. The sundering of an already fragile relationship would probably result in a more serious riot down the road.

They were going to have to board up the church windows he realized, which meant without electrical power it was going to get even stuffier in here even accounting for the easier time they were having for the weather.

Unfortunately congregations were getting older and grey on this side of the color line as well. Not as serious as with even evangelical whites had, but enough the churches could do more than organize rallies. Three percent asian. Five percent hispanic... maybe more. Forty five and change for blacks and whites both. That was the city though. County was whiter overall. Worse they were stuck in the middle ages, the European middle ages. Southern Baptist was not going to go over well with the local germans regardless of whether it was a white man or a black man preaching.
--
Notes: This concludes on the religious snippet, because we are talking about a period, and this is one of the things that I feel is overly overly fucking optimistic about in his writings regarding the wars of religion in this period of European history. This is the period that is really the predecessor to the prototype run of 19th​ century European Nationalism, and quite frankly Flint doesn't seem to have understood that, and that from a social perspective, let me reiterate that Flint's west virginians and Maley and Doc Nichols (or worse as a cliche) do not hold up they come off as idealized Californians in both speech patterns and also in ideological openness and that is also a problem that extends to the downtimers.

And frankly, its a very American fictional thing (like once Weber, in particular comes on, but some of the others help) with regionalism, but I don't think Flint actually grasped the sheer cultural gulf that existed between North Eastern (coastal americans) versus just Englishmen in the time frame of WW1. Never mind the English cultural distinctions of that period versus modern americans of say the west coast (I certainly do not think he understood the social distinctions of class that existed in England in 1914, and certainly not the class and social distinctions of England of the 17th​ century and differing behaviors that entailed)

 

[ATP]

Week 1 (c)​

Michael idly reflected that it was a good thing Luke didn't have a swear jar. That was probably a good thing ... or it would have been if paper money hadn't rapidly devalued itself to uselessness as a result of the sudden case of time travel to the early modern era. He leaned back and looked up at the high ceiling, a reminder that this house had been built without air conditioning in mind.

"Fuck." Walter muttered as he continued to model, and check math, "fuck..." He scratched down some details on a pad. He looked at the map again, "Fuck... fucking county administration, gah." The deputy threw up his hands, looking disgustedly at the error message on the computer, "Stupid magical ring of fire bullshit... this gives me a headache, hey mikey any idea when they're gonna get back?"

Michael sat up, "Uhm, no I don't , sorry." All he really knew was that Oliver had... gotten called to do something. He didn't really know what. As one of four full time lieutenants in the county sheriff's department who had been in the county at the time. Oliver was fairly high up there in terms of management ordinarily anyway, and he was Walter's immediate superior. If the Sheriff was as tradition dictated equivalent to a colonel, the chief deputy was the little bird... or occasionally a major... and then major subdivisions were filled out by lieutenants and captains... it wasn't quite one to one the army... but there were certain antiquarian ideas that retained from the young republic... and it was going to bit them in their collective...

"Its gonna bite us in our ass. We don't have enough people. Fuck we didn't have enough people before this shit."

"What are you doing?" He decided to ask.

"Luke has a professional GIS suite, I'm attempting," Since he wasn't here, and since apparently Walt wasn't having a lot of luck "To plug in our geography and population details into the parts of north Germany we replaced ... or at least just their geography."

"I didn't know you did that in the corp."

Walter sent him a dirty look. "Yeah, well... I really need a second set of eyes used to this software. I also only normally have to plug in crime data, and draw circles, so..." He trailed off glaring from printed off maps, to screens, to notepads and scratch work.

"We could go to the university even if its some module that Luke is using for his research I'm sure the geography and political science labs would have them." Presumably it was something about the preponderance of states or areas that adopted hydroelectric, relative to accessible coal deposits, or some other facet of 20th​ century electrification waves... but Michael didn't go that far. "What do you have so far?"

"I have our rough geographic dimensions, orientation, the altitude changes, so I know roughly how much land was displaced."

There were rough, very rough, mass calculations pulled up on one of the tabs of another calculating program... never mind how much energy it would take to move that much material physically... it boggled the mind.

Walter got up and sauntered around the map table.

The toilet flushed and Michael's brother Tony walked back into the room air drying his hands. Tony looked at the satellite images of the down, and the various marks that had been drawn on the map with a mix of excitement, recognition, and ... something else that Michael didn't recognize, "I never thought I'd see one of these done like this... outside of the usual training areas." They were height and terrain elevations... it didn't take a genius to figure that Michael would have kicked himself for not realize it sooner... but that made sense.

What was clipped on both man's hips though suddenly stood out. They were radios.... Michael had seen them the other day, but had not at the time made much of them. There were still range limitations, but the cell phone network more or less had stabilized on the basis of what towers were still working.

The mud room door opened and Oliver strutted in wearing shiny new captain's insignia, double bars, which he was exuberantly proud of and announced to them. Walter just complained that was going to make things worse in terms of between the Sheriff's department, and the City Police about who got to deputize who... which was a problem Walter had mentioned before.

"Did you get it working?"

"Do you, do I look like I got it working, bro?" Walter responded to Luke's question, "Can you come the fuck over here, and show me what I'm doing wrong."

While they went and fucked with the computer Michael and his brother turned to Oliver, "So what's popping then?" Tony asked.

"So anyway," Oliver shrugged, "My uncle has county admin calmed down... at least for now. I mean that's gonna go out the window if Wallenstein does something stupid, or people start breaking into liquor stores but for the moment things are okay. As long as the power stays I think they'll manage to not run around like chickens with their heads cut off."

"Isn't your mother-,"

"Yeah, but she believes me when I tell her that our portable radios are magical words of sending," that was a DND joke, "and we will totally know that if Wallenstein tries anything, so we can deal with it." Oliver replied, "I mean like..." He trailed. .. Michael felt the looks as his friends, the marines in the room who hadn't been rear echelon motherfuckers as one time his brother, a little too deep in the Christmas punch has complained, after one argument too many had snapped, "Man I really wish you had bought that tank." He trailed off.

Luke looked at him, and scoffed, "Yeah, I don't think it'd do us a whole lot of good, besides the county MRAPs will get better gas mileage, and that's going to be important. Having a working seventy five millimeter sherman and ammo wouldn't do us all that much good..."

"Tch imagine if Anderson had come along."

"Fuck Anderson, give me Clemson." Oliver snorted, "And no not for the football." The tension evaporated among them... even if it didn't change the fact that their situation was that the Holy Roman Empire could afford to drown them in bodies if that was what Wallenstein chose to do, and they weren't prepared for it.

Tony punched him in the arm, "Hey, I might have given you some shit about joining the army, but like you need to back to the university." The non com glanced, "Luke like I'm sure you're doing stuff, but you too man."
Luke nodded, "There is a lot that needs to be done... I wish we had more specialists in early modern history," Michael could empathize, most of the history department, and political science department were focused on other areas, same with the other social sciences. "Lloyd's right that it would have been better if we had replaced the down time county, not be dropped into the thirty years war, the frontlines of the conflict."
--

The words of a preacher cut down too young echoed in his thoughts; 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.' Politics was inherently dynastic, but especially in old towns. That was true for both parties, and his pulpits, especially the wednesday one, had never been more full than after the Ring of Fire.

People claimed to not want people to starve, but could squeal if things that weren't even theirs to begin with had to be taken for the common good. It could have been worse he had had an uncle who'd told him what it had been like during the DC race riots had been like. There had been nothing like what had happened in April of 68. Not that there needed to be to wreck the inner city economy of a much smaller town.

The Mayor seemed to think she could keep up meeting with the church elders, and that would be enough to help. The whole situation with the food was going to help, but it had already stirred everyone up. The local university administration was bucking the Mayor, that had been apparent when university administration had called an emergency faculty meeting for the following day, and he was pretty sure that had been done to stop any more unilateral decisions until they could figure out what they wanted.

He doubted they would get very far. Not quickly anyway; there were plenty of white liberals on the faculty but then that was why he remembered the quote from King. That they weren't willing to go along with anything unconditional made sense, but at the same time was terrible. Thankfully the church, churches really, were used to food assistance programs... food banks...they'd be able to pick up the slack for the time their own stocks lasted. The problem with that was that the City Council, and their County equivalents had been all too ready to nearly come to blows with one another.

As he thought back of his uncle telling his teenage self the stories of DC during the riots he half way wished that the objections about the militarization of police had started far sooner. Oh the 'Reforms' that old Sheriff, and the current sheriff had worked on hadn't been what white people would have called racist. If anything the 'professional standards' had eliminated most of the old guard in favor of hand picked recruits who had gone off to fight the war on terror after nine eleven. That was what concerned him, what had always concerned him.

The old money in the county still controlled a lot. That network of patronage had once controlled the mills, and the large farms had diversified after the great depression relying on politics to keep them afloat. Their numbers had grown smaller as the years had gone on, but the large farms were still there, and they still controlled who got elected to the County Judge among other things. They were going to be a lot more prickly about property rights than anyone else. The sundering of an already fragile relationship would probably result in a more serious riot down the road.

They were going to have to board up the church windows he realized, which meant without electrical power it was going to get even stuffier in here even accounting for the easier time they were having for the weather.

Unfortunately congregations were getting older and grey on this side of the color line as well. Not as serious as with even evangelical whites had, but enough the churches could do more than organize rallies. Three percent asian. Five percent hispanic... maybe more. Forty five and change for blacks and whites both. That was the city though. County was whiter overall. Worse they were stuck in the middle ages, the European middle ages. Southern Baptist was not going to go over well with the local germans regardless of whether it was a white man or a black man preaching.
--
Notes: This concludes on the religious snippet, because we are talking about a period, and this is one of the things that I feel is overly overly fucking optimistic about in his writings regarding the wars of religion in this period of European history. This is the period that is really the predecessor to the prototype run of 19th​ century European Nationalism, and quite frankly Flint doesn't seem to have understood that, and that from a social perspective, let me reiterate that Flint's west virginians and Maley and Doc Nichols (or worse as a cliche) do not hold up they come off as idealized Californians in both speech patterns and also in ideological openness and that is also a problem that extends to the downtimers.

And frankly, its a very American fictional thing (like once Weber, in particular comes on, but some of the others help) with regionalism, but I don't think Flint actually grasped the sheer cultural gulf that existed between North Eastern (coastal americans) versus just Englishmen in the time frame of WW1. Never mind the English cultural distinctions of that period versus modern americans of say the west coast (I certainly do not think he understood the social distinctions of class that existed in England in 1914, and certainly not the class and social distinctions of England of the 17th​ century and differing behaviors that entailed)

Click to shrink...

Yep,Flint in his series go with Democracy good,jews good,protestants good/not all/,cathoics bad/not all/
Which was funny for people who knew something,like me,and knew that in 1632 Democracy would not be supported by anybody in Europe,even in Poland/our gentry considered themselves as kind of roman republic,not democracy/

 

[Imperator Pax]

Yep,Flint in his series go with Democracy good,jews good,protestants good/not all/,cathoics bad/not all/
Which was funny for people who knew something,like me,and knew that in 1632 Democracy would not be supported by anybody in Europe,even in Poland/our gentry considered themselves as kind of roman republic,not democracy/

Click to shrink...

Right and I agree broadly with you, Flint's problem is that I think he wrote 1632 with too many of his friends around him, and as a result its this collab of so and so on the protagonist side is probably really based off one of his friends IRL. [Thats purely speculation on my part, but I absolutely would understand if that were in fact the case] and also the original book was a stand alone loosely speaking America Fuck Yeah book (and I would consider 1633 to be an improvement as a novel, as especially a serial novel) its very much white hat black hat, to the point of almost being this sort of cliche western dynamic.

Thats all well and good, I enjoy the premise, its just I feel the execution is overly optimistic and unrealistic in terms of real people.

 

[ATP]

Right and I agree broadly with you, Flint's problem is that I think he wrote 1632 with too many of his friends around him, and as a result its this collab of so and so on the protagonist side is probably really based off one of his friends IRL. [Thats purely speculation on my part, but I absolutely would understand if that were in fact the case] and also the original book was a stand alone loosely speaking America Fuck Yeah book (and I would consider 1633 to be an improvement as a novel, as especially a serial novel) its very much white hat black hat, to the point of almost being this sort of cliche western dynamic.

Thats all well and good, I enjoy the premise, its just I feel the execution is overly optimistic and unrealistic in terms of real people.

Click to shrink...

Indeed.Good protestants? they burned more witches then catholics.Bad Inquisition? they killed top 10.000 during 600 years,and only they gave prisoners rights to defenders.And tortured them less then anybody else in their times.
Good jews ? they belived in Talmud,and was kind of people who was less enlinghtened then everybody else.

But,it was fun to read.My only complain is,that he do not undarstandt how polish winged hussarls operated,becouse he made them kind of knights.

They were disciplined soldiers - attacked when ordered,and widraw when ordered,too.
And very mobile - thanks to their horses they were capable of aborting charge and retreat,if commander decided that they have no chance to win.

Yes,they were elite - but elite soldiers,not knights.

P.S Polish calvarytactic was highly opportunist - first charger winged hussarls,if commander saw good chance,they attacked and go through enemy to attack next unit.

After them followed 3-4 waves of medium and light calvary which did the same,except last - which remain to finish off what remained of enemy.

But they have no problems with retreat if enemy seems too strong.

Nightmare enemy to fight,becouse only tatars was able to made them fight if they do not wanted.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Indeed.Good protestants? they burned more witches then catholics.Bad Inquisition? they killed top 10.000 during 600 years,and only they gave prisoners rights to defenders.And tortured them less then anybody else in their times.
Good jews ? they belived in Talmud,and was kind of people who was less enlinghtened then everybody else.

But,it was fun to read.My only complain is,that he do not undarstandt how polish winged hussarls operated,becouse he made them kind of knights.

They were disciplined soldiers - attacked when ordered,and widraw when ordered,too.
And very mobile - thanks to their horses they were capable of aborting charge and retreat,if commander decided that they have no chance to win.

Yes,they were elite - but elite soldiers,not knights.

P.S Polish calvarytactic was highly opportunist - first charger winged hussarls,if commander saw good chance,they attacked and go through enemy to attack next unit.

After them followed 3-4 waves of medium and light calvary which did the same,except last - which remain to finish off what remained of enemy.

But they have no problems with retreat if enemy seems too strong.

Nightmare enemy to fight,becouse only tatars was able to made them fight if they do not wanted.

Click to shrink...

See thats straight US pop culture on cavalry being a problem right there. In the US (despite our historical usage of cavalry) the overwhelming pop culture impression is that HORSE SOLDIER ? Totally a knight, this is really bad in US media and popular impression, especially in the case of the Civil War and Indian wars, where predominantly they were fighting as mounted infantry as far as doctrine concerns

Similarly US cavalry doctrine then evolves into (and this goes into the Charge at San Juan, those were not US regulars, those were Volunteers) that US Cavalry is supposed to be a mobile professional battle force they're not chargers this is not the lancers this is not the British Army of the period in doctrine... but most Americans just don't understand cavalry doctrine (Light, medium, heavy, dragoon) versus the simplistic European dude on horse is a knight its very much stuck in this high medieval cliche thats applied backwards and forwards in time even when its very historically inappropriate (especially because Light cavalry, and mounted infantry were a thing in the middle ages).

And when the Polish army does appear later after Grantville comes on the scene, but also in a more accurate representation of both the Swedish/finnish shock cavalry units, and also the Croatian light cavalry rather than the frankly mustache twirling idiot ball performance they given in 1632's appearance.

 

[ATP]

See thats straight US pop culture on cavalry being a problem right there. In the US (despite our historical usage of cavalry) the overwhelming pop culture impression is that HORSE SOLDIER ? Totally a knight, this is really bad in US media and popular impression, especially in the case of the Civil War and Indian wars, where predominantly they were fighting as mounted infantry as far as doctrine concerns

Similarly US cavalry doctrine then evolves into (and this goes into the Charge at San Juan, those were not US regulars, those were Volunteers) that US Cavalry is supposed to be a mobile professional battle force they're not chargers this is not the lancers this is not the British Army of the period in doctrine... but most Americans just don't understand cavalry doctrine (Light, medium, heavy, dragoon) versus the simplistic European dude on horse is a knight its very much stuck in this high medieval cliche thats applied backwards and forwards in time even when its very historically inappropriate (especially because Light cavalry, and mounted infantry were a thing in the middle ages).

And when the Polish army does appear later after Grantville comes on the scene, but also in a more accurate representation of both the Swedish/finnish shock cavalry units, and also the Croatian light cavalry rather than the frankly mustache twirling idiot ball performance they given in 1632's appearance.

Click to shrink...

That is probably true.To be honest,polish gentry levies in 1632 was medium/light calvary which have poor discipline and usually was capable of very little on battlefield.
Well,unless they have core of veterans,then they fought well.

Polish gentry,soldier and writer,Jan Chryzostom Pasek,written in his memories then he would prefer to take care of pigs then command gentry levies.
IF gentry wrote such thing,it mean that at least those who he meet was really afwull.
But,it was after 1656.Maybe in 1632 they were still decent.

Those from regions attacked by tatars certainly must be good,otherwise they would be dead or enslaved.

 

[Imperator Pax]

That is probably true.To be honest,polish gentry levies in 1632 was medium/light calvary which have poor discipline and usually was capable of very little on battlefield.
Well,unless they have core of veterans,then they fought well.

Polish gentry,soldier and writer,Jan Chryzostom Pasek,written in his memories then he would prefer to take care of pigs then command gentry levies.
IF gentry wrote such thing,it mean that at least those who he meet was really afwull.
But,it was after 1656.Maybe in 1632 they were still decent.

Those from regions attacked by tatars certainly must be good,otherwise they would be dead or enslaved.

Click to shrink...

In 1632 my understanding is that the primary weapon of polish medium cavalry units that were still favoring carbines (well carbines or single shot pistols) and this was before doctrine decided to jump back to lances as the primary the so called 'mistake' in doctrine, which in Lithuanian (more eastern) units that was more common anyway due to the expense guns during this period and changes between who you're fighting It may have made more doctrinal sense to use the lance if your medium cavalry is being used a reserve force to cut off or run down an already broken enemy

As to Jan's commentary on commanding gentry levies: In the US Army Reserve there is a shortage of battalion commanders because no one wants to actually command that slot, probably for a lot of the same reasons Jan is writing about in terms of dealing with organization.

 

[ATP]

In 1632 my understanding is that the primary weapon of polish medium cavalry units that were still favoring carbines (well carbines or single shot pistols) and this was before doctrine decided to jump back to lances as the primary the so called 'mistake' in doctrine, which in Lithuanian (more eastern) units that was more common anyway due to the expense guns during this period and changes between who you're fighting It may have made more doctrinal sense to use the lance if your medium cavalry is being used a reserve force to cut off or run down an already broken enemy

As to Jan's commentary on commanding gentry levies: In the US Army Reserve there is a shortage of battalion commanders because no one wants to actually command that slot, probably for a lot of the same reasons Jan is writing about in terms of dealing with organization.

Click to shrink...

Medium calvary,"pancerni"/cossacks/ or "petychorcy"/Lithuania/ have mail as armour,kind of helmet with mail,and usually lances - althought some units have carbines and used them mixed with lances when attacking enemy.

Light calvary was :
1.tatars - usually have bows,and not always were tatars,althought we have tatar units raised from tatars living in Lithuania from medieval times.
1.Wołosi/wallahians/ - lances and light schields,but they almost always were poles.

Interesting thing about polish army - some units were named after nation from which they were copied,but usually they were poles.

The same goes for infrantry - we have german infrantry/with pikes/ and hungarian/all muskets with berdiches/ ,but they usually were polis peasants who choosed being soldiers..

Althought,again,we had foreign units,too.

 

[Imperator Pax]

October 1917

The papers on the desk painted a grim picture. The letters were worse... but it was the telegrams that really the biggest problem for what was going on south. That wasn't counting the influenza cases hitting Shanghai, and were probably going to do a number in Tietsin, with the flooding... and if Qirui was adamant about sending north chinese troops down... well...


Qirui's successes were all on a timer. He'd hit the logistical tail end for his operations. Shells were limited, and now he was running into manpower shortages because the the other Beiyang divisions weren't sure what was going on between him and Feng. Even Cao Kun was starting to get vocally uncomfortable in his public telegrams.

That situation was at least as responsible for moving Chen's troops to occupy Hankow in attempt to insure the arsenal continued to produce ammunition that then made its way to Duan's various artillery batteries aligned in pairs and spread over an ever widening front.

As a complicating strategic factor was the explosive growth of the population of the lower yangtze in particular over the last century, at the bare minimum, and the effects it had had on an already restive population. There were more people that needed to be fed that needed to still live on the same amount of land in the area.

The premier could not have been ignorant of the pressures his troop movements were putting on the dujun for Kiangsi, Hupeh, or Kiangsu but it was just as likely he thought if he pushed a little harder a little , a little more that things would fall into place and that his successes would bring victory. It didn't look like that was going to happen. The numbers just didn't add up. The papers from the yangtze provinces were increasingly hostile to the whole affair, and they hadn't exactly started out flattering of the adventure to begin with.

George shook his head, "He could surprise us, but if its not done before Christmas he'll have problems." It wasn't just shells it was the coffers running empty to buy other goods. Qirui had needed loans to fight Zhang Xun, admittedly that had been because he had needed money to raise enough troops to avoid a stand up fight. Gathering up those fifty thousand men had probably been a costly proposition in the best of times never mind when the local commanders might have preferred they stay close at home to discourage their own homes from being targeted.

While that was arguably the bigger real problem that the national assembly, the parliament, wasn't happy was another hurdle to Duan's ambitions. Even if Feng had signed off on the necessary paperwork the parliament would have complained about the expense being extracted from the national coffers and Duan knew that. He knew he needed other sources of funding. Reinsch had been told to leave it well enough alone, but they were waiting to see if the minister would actually do what he was told.

Lansing might well have to fight the president over loan reorganization, but that was vastly less likely to upset parliament. They were fairly certainly that at the end of the month the second loan from Nishihara had gone through... they were still trying to piece together where the bank in Taiwan was getting the money for there share the deal was done though.

Mitsui, or Mitsubishi. He knew they were competing. He doubted that the second generation firms of note had the capital to pull it. He had taken time to make a few phone calls of his own and it didn't seem like they were there... but it also wasn't like he'd really expected anyone to want to carry on over the phone. No if they were going to get answers it would have to be in person, and Noguchi was too busy travelling between Korea and Taiwan this summer.

It just didn't occur at the time that the answer was obvious. That it was Terauchi's government themselves underwriting the loans. It should have. Twenty million yen was a decent amount of money and of course Wilson had declared the US government would underwrite the loans to support the war effort to the European partners despite the Federal Reserves concerns about European solvency. France's government had underwritten loans by their private banks, and Britain had also done the same, but it simply hadn't occurred. The war loans ultimately were in theory supposed to be backed by gold reserves... but sometimes you just missed things in front of your nose.

Japan was a partner in the banking consortium the general body of which tried to organize governmental foreign loans as a part of a public body politic. 'No Secret Diplomacy' as Wilson would have called it, though he was not the instigator of that clause to the apparatus.

"This is turning into a repeat of last time." And that was despite no Tsai O to lead in the south, arguably this go around was much more conventional. Tsai had been willing to use skirmishers and cavalry to get around and behind to harass northern positions, and while that wasn't off the table there was a lack of higher coordination to make those harassers effective. "There is an under current of problems."

Unlike most provinces, and as a result of Szechwan's characteristics of geography both in expanse and the topographical traits of the province there was no single fellow in charge. The so called garrisons of the qing era had become succeeded by about a half dozen major regional commanders and then a scattering of dozens of minor part time warlords or bandits on their margins. Stuck in between were the various county and town militias in Szechwan that might be used and forcibly conscripted by one of the big fish to pad his numbers.

"It gets worse." There was a ruffling, "We started asking about the second round of loans, IBJ's portion of the capital. The bank's representatives think there movement on the canal deal, and not just the canal, the whole rail, telegraph overhaul." There were other American firms in China. Standard Oil before they'd been broken up had been ubiquitous as the heating fuel and now while much reduced still had two subsidiaries active in China. There were other factories. There were various textile, and cash crop enterprises... but the problem had been most of the funding for expansion had been based on either a large parent holding i.e. Standard or backing stock on Wall Street or a trading house... the tobacco was doing fine but the problem with a large parent company was most had been wooed towards investing in European war bonds or contracts for production stateside. "Here, that should look familiar."

It was in English. No surprise. English was the defacto lingua fraca of international trade. There were partners from New York and London both signing on. Dawes was right though the project outline was indeed of a familiar layout.

It wasn't finalized, but the format suggested that the filing was done in such a way that... the principles were agreed upon. He wasn't that surprised. It looked like a late Qing document. Hell it probably was, the truth was the work on the canal was decades overdue. The canal had needed massive overhaul during the Taiping rebellion and that had only gotten worse, but that wasn't the issue. "What do you make of it?"

"Japan's position seems pretty clear. I mean this has to be Lansing and Ishii having come to terms."

Dawes was probably right. At the start of the war the British had acknowledged that Japan would take possession of German possessions in Shandong. That was in writing, so even if the French wanted to protest that it would be a hard sale and the Industrial Bank of Japan running the loans and through say Tokyo or more likely Mitsui would just ignore french protests something the American Rail Corp was unlikely to do with their current board. JP Morgan's influence there would make them liable to influence regarding the ongoing war.

He weighed the scales, running the numbers.

The Russo-Asiatic bank though and the French credits lines were nonexistent, even if Yokohama was probably overleveraged it wasn't nearly to the extent of France or Russia, and Belgium certainly couldn't take up the fight.

Jordan and Reinsch had both been quiet about this, which was unusual... Reinsch had pursued the previous iteration of the canal deal and had seemed annoyed when the ARC board had balked under french pressure. Then things had gone into a lull, and the professor had gone back. Japan had had a seat at the table originally according to this, at least in Shandong before hand... "We'll need to see the 1914 papers, but these date to before the war."

"The Japanese cited the open door, whether that was because IBJ is on board, or because it was to tweak the Germans I don't know." The latter was possible too, if not necessarily annoyance at the shandong concession in general. "But I was really talking about the rail rights."

The 1913 1914 agreement would have been signed by Yuan Shikai... maybe even Sun's signature depending on when in 1913 the agreement had been, but probably his successors signature as portfolio of railway development in the cabinet. "Map?" Had they done survey work?

"No, but you can see the writing."

He could see the writing on the wall. The Japanese would cite the open door, and IBJ's earlier participation in the previous planning no doubt, but then to make sure the British got on side would cite British agreements regarding the peninsula. The French would throw a fit, because if the railway went through. The new line would be American money financing a wide ranging list of lines would be into Kwangsi, regions that previously the french claimed to have been given preferential rights toward, but had not had the capital to act on.

"We saw them make those protests this spring."

"The French mutinies the Russians collapsing. Nishihara's loans." All of the above... others still. "Williard," From the money behind the American Railway Corporation, "is in Shenyang almost can bet that that's related to the concessions on the Trans siberian as well... and if that's the case."

Simple process of elimination told them it wasn't John Jordan. It certainly wasn't Reinsch. Looking further up the food chain, it seemed possible that it could have Balfour or Lansing. Balfour seemed unlikely he was pro french, he was rumored to be a staunch francophile.. unless he was taking the legal concession to Japan on Shandong strenuous like.... still seemed unlikely to be him.

Lansing? It was possible, it was no secret he'd been annoyed with the French this spring over their supposed secret rights in Kwangsi. Following the ranks, Viscount Ishi... it was possible that this was something he and Ishi had agreed on. ... but "Jordan hadn't told Reinsch explicitly we're the ones making the link into Central Asia."

"Yeah I heard that, which," He grunted. "I hate people pulling my strings. That's what this feels like... and by somebody who either doesn't know or doesn't care what a mess this will make of down south." He paused, "Speaking of that I'm planning to go over that, Percy is up the wall over this Tashkent Soviet anarchy... he's got some Russian Cavalry general," Probably one of several pro British officers of the Russian Imperial staff... or whatever in Tietsin.

"Things are getting worse."

 

[ATP]

If spanish flu is there,they could only wait till it stop.Well,made quarantine,and do not use aspirin.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Week 1 (d)​

The new government center had been constructed within the last decade with federal money ponied up to take advantage of green energy initiatives in geothermal... not that that actually worked that well since as it turned out the design was woefully insufficent for dealing with summer heat in the south... which would have been the problem that he'd have normally been focusing on.... was the inevitable oops something failed in the new system... which was his usual double duty. The Sheriff's department had complained about running dispatch through the government center, but they'd wanted that federal funding for upgrades too... they shouldn't have acted like it had been just the city.

Not that city or county asked his two cents.

He had been getting run ragged since Monday... really since Sunday, but they'd wanted to do, news broadcasts that were largely impromptu speeches while people were shouting, and carrying on. As the head of the local office of the state's emergency management he didn't actually report to the mayor, or the executive of the county, and he certainly didn't report to any single member of the state legislature. It was a mostly academic point though. He was five six and all pointdexter. He was not configured to the take charge and start barking orders to people... and that wasn't what his job was. His job was to proffer advice, and make recommendations, which was the opposite of what local governments wanted, they wanted him to pick a side.

The problem with all of the scenarios his office had on hand were about dealing with mundane things like hurricanes. Oh sure there were some copies of the what to do in the event of nuclear war... that had probably been last updated before the Berlin wall had fell, and there were some more modern outlandish things like dirty bombs, but nothing about being transported into the past. Never mind what to do in the event of a war.

That wasn't to say all of the scenarios had been completely useless. Plans for forest fires useful, as were the ones for major disruption of civil services, and how they related to natural gas mains and safety. That had been what most of his people had been working out with the local gas company about how to go about it.

He had given the best advise he could give given the information he had available. The situation did seem very bleak. Without modern necessities society was going to break down. Even with national aid Hurricane Katrina had failed because at every level beginning at the local one there hadn't been a plan, and without local roots the state had had nothing to build off of, and the national program had clumsily attempted to wing it after they'd finally been given the go ahead. By that point the damage had been done. On the plus side they weren't dealing with a hurricane, on the downside they didn't have any kind of higher level aid to come. Most of his recommendations were based off of emergency management guidelines, that presupposed outside help, in the short term they needed to keep people fed and safe. They were sheltering in place, because there was no where to evacuate to, and there was no immediate danger structurally speaking.

In Katrina of course with safer grounds to run to those with the means had done so. The result had been that wide swathes of emergency services had hightailed it out of there with their families before the mandatory evacuation orders by the state had even been considered. That had in turn led to uncontrolled looting, and only compounded other mistakes by the city of New Orleans even after the National Guard had arrived. Everyone here was stuck here, and at home... just without electricity.

If they had been at home in the heat of the south he'd have put more priority on the city civic center getting power back. That way with power to it people could have escaped the heat and sheltered there during hottest parts of the day. Given it was barely seventy degrees outside right now, and cloudy at that, he didn't think summer heat was going to be all that much of a problem. Winter on the other hand... months down the road if they got there... was a terrifying prospect. That would still have been getting ahead of themselves though.

Part of the problem with everything was that most of the large public structures, in contrast to the building, weren't new enough to have been constructed with renewable energy in mind to take load off the grid. The University system had a few on geothermal, and solar. Those were purely supplementary though the University had basically had to cut off its air conditioning because the power requirements for their usual cooling was out of the question in their situation. They apparently did have enough power to run lights, and the computer labs though. Their cafeteria might be the best option for a food kitchen, but right now the university administration was trying to carefully stradle the line between city and county government not wanting to alienate either when it was unclear who was going to end up in charge if they even did manage to figure something out. It didn't help that the univeristy was one of the city's major employers... it wasn't inaccurate to call it a college town... and then on top of that there were a lot of young people here because of the university, or the community college.

That was what... part of what still put government still up in the air of course. He wished they would figure something out, but until they did he could only give advice, and hoped he was making the right suggestions, and that they listened to them.

They had been here ... here ... for a few days now, and people were struggling to make sense of it all, and most people weren't going to good of a job at it. All of the material in his office talked about fundamental basics, but presupposed certain things. Things that everyone took for granted that had now been stripped away. That was made even worse by apparently being surrounded by bloodthirsty savages.

He leaned back into his plush office chair and sagged into the cushions. They had the police for the time being they'd be able to put them at any food kitchen... but given the guys who had attacked them had had guns... okay primitive guns... they were going to have to put them... on the border, which was a really odd notion to contend with. That hadn't really been a FEMA planning topic except jokingly when it came to interacting with the Federal agency... and none of their supervisors had found it very funny so they had had to stop talking about it. He'd never actually thought they'd be invaded... but it wasn't really an invasion.

They weren't in America anymore. There wasn't really an America anymore. Pretending otherwise when they'd been wrenched to who knew when, what was in allegedly Germany. He wanted to curl up under his desk and hide... but thankfully there was enough order he could afford to work without worrying someone might try and hack him into pieces for fun. So no national guard was coming, and he really hoped that the arguments between everyone would chill out.

He looked mournfully at his phone. He regretted that there was no internet, and that the increasing sophistication of the cell phone had largely rendered obsolete mp 3 players... never mind the walkman he'd had back in the nineties. He needed the upbeat rock music to cheer him up, or he was never going to get through all the hard copies of 'what to do in emergencies' that he had piled in front of him.

He also wanted coffee, and then tossed the guidelines for 'social media during emergencies' into a corner... that wasn't going to help him given they had no facebook. He knew now that he'd thought about it he might as well go get some... coffee that was. It wasn't even noon even... he had had coffee with breakfast. He got up and trudged to the break room, as he considered what all had happened at the 'meeting'.

It wasn't like Martial law had been a terrible idea... a wildly impractical one with their manpower sure, but the idea itself wasn't bad. A curfew at least... that was just sensible. Unfortunately people were already throwing sense out the window... and while they hadn't been writhing in panic they had been ready to argue vehemently over small details. So far it seemed like the whole county had come along, and it had happened on a weekend so the workforce who would have been here from neighboring counties wasn't... which really would have been useful to them now.

The City had no interest in listening to the county administrator. The council had no interest in taking orders from the mayor of the county seat. The police chief and the sheriff had nearly come to blows with one another. The latter hadn't even made sense to Patrick Huff, but as a much shorter and pudgier man in glasses he had shut up and let them argue. So had most people It had taken the former sheriff to calm his successor down, and then a ten minute recess turning into a twenty minute one to get everyone calmed down enough to actually start talking about anything productive... and they... all they had by the end of the meeting were ideas. Most of them weren't even really that great ideas... just simple should have been obvious things like the curfew idea that hadn't actually gone into effect until the day after

Patrick Huff looked longingly towards his vice of choice, and groaned. He really didn't look forward to the idea of them running out of caffeine.-
--
They had driven over largely in silence. The radio remaining tuned to the emergency broadcast channel... but truthfully they had harris radios handy and expected if something happened t would be through those that word would come first. Walter's SCAR 17 had its suppressor on it, but was racked in the seat space between, along with an also suppressed HK.

He doubted they would need the rifles.

Oliver couldn't make it, which would slow down moving stuff. Maybourne popped his trunk door, "I appreciate this man." It was wet Wednesday morning. Mayboure had a clean set of olive drab pants, and a matching Massif shirt. Over laid with his plate carrier, and his other gear. He'd gotten time off to do this, which was a little surprising actually.

"Not a thing." The man replied stepping out of the driver's side of the trunk, "And you have a giant shoot me first sign on you."

Maybourne rolled his eyes, "Fuck don't I always." He crossed in front of the truck, "Come on Mary's at her office talking with the partners. Her mom has the kids." The deputy's house was a little under four thousand square feet. Five bedrooms, five baths, two stories... built before the housing bubble went under. The backyard was fenced, and not in a way that practical to drive into the backyard. At least there wasn't a basement. "You think we can move the safe?"

"I want Oliver here for that, maybe two other guys, like how we brought it in." The last thing he wanted was a sixty gun safe being dropped on anyone's toes never mind for it to tip over.

"Yes sir." Maybourne grunted opening the gate to the back. "We'll start with the storage building, and then I guess the pantry." Maybourne's lot was a bit under an acre and a half. It was a picturesque yard, and basically ideal suburban property. Blame the HOA, for that of course Maybourne had joked often enough. "My boy is going to go crazy without the Playstation." He unlocked the storage building, and gestured around. "Its three months worth of food. We can pack up my reloading press. The ammo." He continued talking as they walked.

Loading took, nearly two hours with just the two men. The drive was... eerie in that they were the only car on the road.

Victor Lucius Gunther lived on more rural portion of the county. They hadn't exactly worked out the elevation differential, not for sure, but he was certain they were no longer two hundred meters above sea level. They were definitely higher than the surrounding European land mass, but certainly not by the difference in home and here were. Whatever the differential was he was going to be worried when the rain came in... washouts and floods and mudslides besides.

Acreage spread out before them. Mostly untilled. Part of it was woodlands that his uncle Vince had allowed, starting in the late eighties, sections of to be cut for timber most of the farmland was fallow kept cut by a tractor with a bushhog attachment, and scraped down even over winter, and occasionally seeded with winter wheat. Mostly to draw deer in to fatten them up for hunting season, "Bet you wish you'd planted more this year." Walt grunted leaning to watch the birds fly.

"Not really."

"What?" Maybourne bug eyed him as if the reply had declared the sky was in fact purple.

"Gas, fertilizer, nitrogen treatment, pesticides, I'm not used to handling much more than this. I certainly wouldn't be ready to deal with it on top of everything else thats going on." The ranch style fencing was multi layered most freestanding rectangles that didn't connect to the others. "I doubt I have storage space, and even if I did that still wouldn't address gas to actually handle harvesting, or water for irrgation. Getting right down to it, we can sell seed stock to the locals, but we're gonna need to buy their produce."

Maybourne nodded, "Didn't think of that." He stopped, "Wait your house is on a deep well how would water be an issue?"

His friend shoved a long bony finger out towards the fallow patch, "I don't have anything to irrigate those untended fields, the well is drilled right by the house. I also haven't checked the creek yet either, but it might go dry if its not connected to a source. The dam stops the lake from draining down river , but that's probably why town doesn't have power." or more accurately why it was having power problems.

"Shit." Maybourne snarled. "The fucking idiots in city." He glanced sideways, punched his steering wheel; lightly. "Come on those assholes are why we lose wars. You know it. People like them." He looked like he wanted to punch the door, "boss my kids weren't in Afghanistan with me when they were shooting at us."

He turned the truck off, and stepped off, "Its not like I don't have room." It wasn't a plantation house per se. It was too 'new' to be from that period, but it was old and huge in comparison more modern construction, on the outside anyway, at three stories, brick, and three fireplaces it hadn't been built with modern HVAC in mind, and the rooms for sleeping space were smaller than modern norms for housing construction. "The lakehouse also came."

"Its on propane too isn't it?"

"Yes."

He laughed at the succinct replied, "Nice." He wanted to say something more about that... but wasn't sure how the lake was going to work out. There were fish in it... but...

"I was going to let Tony rent it if he decided to move back here," Maybourne nodded, his wife had been trying to convince Luke to sell the place to her firm since it had come into his possession, and he had moved back to town.

He laughed, "Don't let Mary know you were gonna that." He got out and leaned against his back against the truck and sunk down, thumping his head back, "Shit. So much for hanging out there with the kids this summer. So if the waterways are fucked up boss, what do we do?" Both men abruptly snapped towards the road at the approaching car. The oddity of the noise compared to their previous isolation. Maybourne started to relax as the black BMW convertible came there way, only to stop when the narrowed slits of his friend's eyes became apparent. He'd known that there had been bad blood. It wasn't like the property division had been some kind of surprise. There ways you could get around death taxes if you had time to put it in writing. "Boss?" He asked.

"Lets see what he wants." It was amazing how people you least wanted to see tended to turn up when they had problems, and likely expected all previous issues to be dropped without a word. If that was true normally the veritable end of life as people new it certainly held to that.

Walter made the distinction between the two men pretty easily, family resemblance aside it was the musculature difference really, though the differing tans gave a little contrast to how they looked. There had been less difference in high school, where the two Gunthers had been on different sports, different classes different clubs, but still in the same age bracket. Charles Alexander shared all the usual family traits. High cheekbones, long ish face.

Tony was standing there on the railing of the deck watching them. "Whats up?"

"Lets not move anything off the truck until after he leaves yeah?"

"What if your cousin doesn't want to leave?" Walter shot back.

Viktor grunted conceding that point as he left the rifle racked in the center. This was a different sort of fight.... and probably an opportunity. "Charles."

There ws a crack about using the end of the world as nopportunity to get the gang from high school back together... it wasn't like that.

--
Notes: looking at my original outline because of course this is both an old story, and its tied up, and disorganized across a collection of sub folders on an old computer. The original plan was for Chapter 2 to be just Monday after the ring of fire, and then Chapter 3 to be through out the week 1 of the event.

What will happen is that there will be a second engagement with a scouting party, before we move into machine parts, and metal fabrication down time. I should clarify that in American Vernacular, a civics center is a combination public venue, hockey rink in door soccer stadium presentation concert hall large building its not a 'government/administration building' They were enerally built to have emergency shelters since they proliferated during the cold war but most major government funded buildings (post offices, primary schools, and such were required, I think banks also were required to have fallout shelters if they were constructed in certain zoning areas, transportation hubs as well IIRC)

 

[Imperator Pax]

October 1917
Things had used to be so god damn simple, well looking backs thing were more simple than they had probably felt at the time.

Before 1914 Allen could recall every time he'd had to involve a magistrate for something. He'd fill out a letter send it off to the man in Shijiazhuang, and generally he'd get some kind of response by the end of the day because the man had had a phone in his office and would call when he got the letter. Evidentiary procedure varied a little more, but the first step was having the magistrate take things up and then start ascertaining the facts.... which typically meant that whoever filed the petition could shape how things went.

In Zhili that had been one thing. In Shansi ... after Bai Lang had been put down it had become wholly another. They had however taken a step beyond.... whatever the previous level had been. He supposed that technically they had officially replaced an absentee Chen Shufan... besides Chen had other things to deal with... what with his brigade being moved into a new posting at the Hankow arsenal.

The problem with it being official was Chen had rarely dealt with the civilian side of things. There was a significant backlog of administrative business. For the first time in his life he could truly get why so many scholars memorialized the need for people to compromise in their civil disputes with one another in the thousand years...

There was a beginning of a protest from one of the Cadre "I cant-"

"Yes you can." Allen grunted rolling his eyes, and stopped play with the silk lining of his sleeve, "You knew as well as the rest of us that Chen wasn't arbitrating the disputes and had been avoiding pushing them up the chain." Everyone had known. Chen didn't want it making a fuss in Peking so he'd just left it to his subordinates to try and settle out. The problem with that was there had been building issues with the local banking apparatus since the Qing had fallen. The first obviously had been the tumultuous founding of the republic... but the second had been Baiyang in the countryside and the growth of the city afterwards. Li had been able to keep things together but when he'd been replaced for supporting President Li... "Its an eight month backlog of where Chen wasn't dealing with it, plus whatever Li didn't get to doing." The question was how far that went back... three four proceeding governors?

"It is worse than what we thought it would be." Waite interrupted, George flipped through a cover sheet to the documents below. "We can start putting committees together and clearing some of the back log." There was a pause as he confirmed that they had cases that apparently had been put forward during Gao's tenure, and thus sidelined when been replaced in March of 1914. There were probably cases and disputes from before that. Song had replaced him given the problems with the White Wolf but had been replaced in turn at the end of Bai Lang's marauding. Lu had been in about ... maybe a year and a half. "I'll put Cao Pei in charge of civil disputes he can put a team together for digging up the facts and writing everything up. That can deal with the marriage disputes, inheritance, we'll deal with all the civil law stuff."

Cullen snorted, "Right, I'll deal with the fighting." He grunted looking through his own stack, and using the Qing era legal term. That was to be the division. One wing would handle civil disputes particularly over patrimony, debts, land disputes. The Gendarmes would handle a second wing dealing with criminal disorder up to the particularly heinous crimes including murder.

The division in the labor to work on the backlog would also take differing routes in how it pursued the cases. George's first recourse was to appoint one of his accountants, the aforementioned Cao Pei, in charge of a fact finding mission that would pull its staff from primarily corporate rather than the 'army' personnel. Cullen and the Gendarmes route subdivided their pool of the work almost entirely in house within their own ranks assigning young officers like Guan to divide criminal offenses into investigations that could be worked.

The idea was to settle disputes, and solve cases. The archiving of results went into a new building with a card catalog for easy reference... and that would be the basic norm of things until 1920.
--
He looked at one of the posters before turning his attention back to what was in front of him. It was pastel colors. He hadn't met the artist, but the artwork represented a change, a gradual policy. It was a Chinese style art work... trying to navigate around old colloquialisms. The tiger was attempting to explain of crucible steel. Whether it would work, and the analogy to military effort, and strength... well they would have to see.

Allen flipped through the documents for the umpteenth time. The Qing had hoped was probably the wrong word, but their attempt to prompt western style business practices from their merchants was to ... basically wholesale copy German business law. It hadn't worked. He could still remember the hearings and the million questions that covered just the most basic sort of things from officials.

Shansi and Shensi bankers and merchants had been involved in Szechwan's salt trade. It had been Shansi bankers who had helped support Li Hongzhang though their influence had declined before Yuan Shikai had taken power. The war with Japan, the boxers, then the fall of the dynasty in particular. The collapse of the Qing had hit them hard. Szechwan had come apart at the seems and was now divided into a collection of prominent warlords exercising sway over too smile fiefdoms to truly sustain them.

That was not a grievance he could address he wouldn't send the division into the province, but there needed to be some relief. They needed to be restructure and apply a new standard banking law into Xian's banking sector even if the concept of joint, and several obligation was going to give the local banking apparatus a headache because from the sense of things that western corporate notion didn't exist in traditional Chinese corporate law managing contracting parties. The province had never succeeded or perhaps never attempted in placing the translated German practices into... well practice.

As he continued to work through, he supposed that might be itself a small blessing in disguise. If no one had adopted those laws no one abided by them there should be in theory no confusion in place different banking laws in place.

He looked through the pages outlining the railway concession. They weren't identical to the rights the Qing had conveyed to their stockholders, but they were close enough. It hadn't escaped him that Duan agreeing to Siems Carey had... well he had plenty of reason to do that. The ARC could build the two hundred fifty miles to finish the line that would link Hankow, and thus Peking, to Canton. Lucrative wouldn't begin to describe being able to run cargo from Canton all the way to the Yangtze by rail. The other twelve hundred miles of main program track... that would take them more than a year, but, he doubted that would matter.

If there hadn't been a war on he could guess what would have happened. The French would have accidentally lost a whole lot of guns or had someone sell them cheap to the provincial officials in exchange for concession rights, which the French would then promptly try and use as justification to any French investments, and exclusive rights in wherever.

Allen suspected that was the basis of current French objectives. The French hadn't been able to show any written documents to his knowledge substantiating their apparent claims in Guangxi, but he wasn't privy to the whole matter. Had that been what had happened... it was possible... he knew the British had claimed they had certain land rights to build a railway... but the British had actually gone and then built that railway... so it was very possible they had gone to the governor and bought those rights with the intent of acting on it.

It was giving him a headache. He didn't need this, and the knock on the door was welcome. "Nakamichi welcome back. Soho-san, you look well." he replied a little more formally standing up as the two men were waved into the office. "I've spoken with Iseburo," Among other things this whole railway business, but also, that, "He said you were planning to write a book."

"It is just a small thing." The old journalist replied in false modesty. They made small talk that more or less was the circular over infrastructure and investment prompted growth, and so forth. "The printing bureau has expanded." He observed.

"Bigger demand for text books," He replied, and glanced to Nakamichi, after all you needed scientific progress to help commerce and industry thrive, and all that "The change over to printing in the vernacular helps with the schools, but I'm not going to lie its caused some confusion."

"Of course you should write how people speak," The newspaper man chuckled leaning back in the chair he'd taken a seat in, "I told you that years ago." Then a little more self conscious, "Because of course that was the advice I was given when I was a young man."

"Its good advice, no doubt." He replied. Soho always spoke an easy vernacular english. He didn't bother trying to be formal in a private setting, which made him a dangerous reporter. He decided to pivot to things, before Soho could build momentum, "How is the front?"

"I really missed the opportunity when we fought the Russians," and Allen wasn't surprised that that comment followed into an admission he'd been in contact with Akashi... and that ... things in Russia were declining steadily from bad to worse... the degree of how worse they would get he hadn't even begun to consider... "And of course the British know this very well. They have appointed a special commissioner for 'South Russia' as they have called the post."
--
Notes: This is a direct call forward to what happens in several weeks of the Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent terrors, the creation of the Commissioner position for southern Russia is early, as I've already mentioned the British are moving a little faster on things because there are other things going on.

Since we're on the matter of railways and calls forward, I might as well bring up the MAK and the other cadre government, and the differences. In 1919 in may John Jordan presents an arms embargo declaration to the nominal Chinese Foreign minister on behalf of the British Empire and the diplomatic / international body*. The more I look at it I have to assume this idea had probably been kicking around in his head before this but none of my primary sources, and certainly nothing I have explicitly comments on where this idea came from, before the May 1919 protests regarding the terms of Versailles. The * here again as I've said, and will probably repeat is that this appears to have been John Jordan on his own initiative, and he appears to have browbeat some of the missions into agreeing... and for example Reinsch's agreement did not make it legally binding on the US or its citizens; that's a whole other issue. Its really Harding-Coolidge... and their compliance is... spotty relative to what Jordan had in mind.

Anyway there were two (or three if you count direct non compliance by state nationals of the countries who signed on to Jordan's 'decree') main ways this was gotten around the first is that they bought from non signatories (Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, others) or alternatively they bought from Signatories and had them shipped via third party shipping lines i.e. Latin american shipping firms (the UK US, France and Japan were all in principal agreement, but as with the third condition firms from all signatories including the UK (Vickers especially) willfully ignored the Foreign Office and John Jordan and his successors sometimes outright publicly scorning them and sometimes just rules lawyering (see especially on aircraft)).

This brings us to Middle America and the post war (WW1) in order to get around the embargo Xian buys from both non signatories (Sweden, and Switzerland), and also buys also through middle men in this case the middle american branch, who are buying up cheap surplus because bannana wars are going on. Such that while its not the focus of the story, and the timeline if we ever get around to the post cold war (or if the author of the CYOA this originally spawned from does a Mexican civil war / revolution, or Bannana wars CYOA in the same vein) it will get more focus. Lansing gets palace couped after WIlson has his stroke, so the state department under Colby... largely sits around and does nothing substantial in that period

 

[Unique]

The more i read the more I think of"Arasaka" from Cyberpunk. A corporation that is it's own country. Will Allen"s Cadre become a Mega corporation or a country?

 

[Imperator Pax]

The more i read the more I think of"Arasaka" from Cyberpunk. A corporation that is it's own country. Will Allen"s Cadre become a Mega corporation or a country?

Click to shrink...

They eventually make the transition to nation state which is really more or less what happens in 1920 when the constitution is established. The corporate side still exists, and is vaguely mega corp in character but like the British FSO in the 20s makes jokes about how Xian likes to pretend they're 'just a collection of businessmen' and by the time second and third generation personnel come on the scene its really more akin to the Chaebol situation of modern south korea mixed with having active duty military officers as national level politicians who are involved on the corporate side.

Part of that is that while the company is the government at present, it also doesn't perceive that its outside of the current Chinese / beiyang government... that changes after the Beiyang fully splinters and becomes divided into the cliques but by that point its a collection of separate provinces and thats the 1920s. That will entail an actual government bureaucracy the subsequent formation of a northern chinese state that will go into WWII and then the unification of CHina (after which Allen retires from main line politics in favor of his son). The Cadre after 1920 transitions to being akin to a combination of the Senate (or the House of Peers) combined with the Genryo, with a nominal / largely vestigial (in 1920) lower house that develops and matures but that transition is as the institution matures as a political organization in nation state.